Readers and listeners like my books,
Yet a certain poet calls them crude.
What do I care, I serve up food
To please my guests, not fellow cooks.
(Book 9, poem 81)
The first thing you discover in the 1964 Penguin Classics paperback edition of Martial’s epigrams, as translated by James Michie, is that this is very far from being a complete edition, in fact it represents only about ten per cent of Martial’s total output.
Martial biography
Martial’s full name was Marcus Valerius Martialis, the cognomen ‘Martialis’ indicating that he was born in March. He was born about 40 AD in the Roman province of Spain and came to Rome around 63, during the reign of Nero. Here, apparently, rather than embark on the cursus honorem or sequence of recognised public offices (quaestor, praetor, aedile, consul) or undertake a recognised profession such as lawyer and advocate, Martial preferred to live by his wits, making himself a witty entertainer and dinner party companion to rich patrons.
Amazingly, Martial seems to have been able to support himself this way for 35 years until he retired back to Spain about 98. (12.18 is a good-humoured song of praise to the simple life back in his home town far from the rigours of Roman life, apparently addressed to his friend, Juvenal the satirist.)
During all those years Martial was dependent on his wealthy friends and patrons for gifts of money, for his dinner, and even for his dress. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, in his earlier career he used to accompany his patrons to their villas at Baiae or Tibur and to attend their morning levées. Later on, he owned a own small country house near Nomentum, and sent a poem, or a small volume of his poems, as his representative to the morning levée. He cultivated patrons far and wide and was especially proud at being invited to dinner with Domitian.
And yet, God, it was a shabby, humiliating and tiring sort of life, as his later poems convey:
Have mercy on me, Rome, a hired
Flatterer desperately tired of flattery…
(10.74)
Martial is best known for his twelve books of epigrams, published in Rome between 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian (81 to 96), Nerva (96 to 98) and Trajan (98 to 117). Martial wrote a rather terrifying total of 1,561 epigrams, of which 1,235 are in elegiac couplets. This Penguin selection contains only about 150 of them. A notable feature of the Penguin edition is that it contains the Latin original next to Michie’s translation of it (although this seems to be standard practice; the much more recent Oxford University Press selection does the same).
What is an epigram?
“An epigram is a short, pithy saying, usually in verse, often with a quick, satirical twist at the end. The subject is usually a single thought or event.” (Academy of American Poets)
It derives from the Greek epigraphein, meaning ‘to write on, to inscribe’ and originally referred to the inscriptions written on stone monuments in ancient Greece. Slowly the term became separated from the act of inscription and by 300 BC referred to any brief, pointed poem, generally about or addressed to someone.
In his 1,500 epigrams Martial is widely agreed to have taken the form to its highest point and every proponent of the epigram for the following 2,000 years to some extent echoes or copies him.
Two texts preface the selection, a 2-page translator’s note by James Michie and an 8-page introduction by scholar Peter Howell.
Translator’s note
In his translator’s note, Michie says the selection is not intended as ‘Martial’s greatest hits’. Rather, the entries were selected to demonstrate Martial’s variety. The texts of the twelve books of epigrams which have come down to us were not arranged logically or thematically, but to ‘reflect the odd juxtapositions of life itself’.
Thus a scatological squib is followed by a deeply felt epitaph (for his 6-year-old slave, Erotion mentioned twice, in 5.34 and 10.61; for the dexterous slave boy Pantagathus, 6.52; or for Pompey the Great, 5.74); contrived panegyrics to Domitian (for liking his poems 4.8; for having impressive fish 4.30; for widening Rome’s roads, 7.61) next to scabrous abuse of someone with bad breath (1.87); a pornographic poem about buggery (1.46) next to a poem lamenting the fickle condition of the dinner party hanger-on (2.27); extended descriptions of a country house (4.64) next to a vivid description of a sumptuous dinner (5.78); corruption at the chariot races (6.46) next to comic behaviour at a slave auction (6.66); insults to a rival poet (7.3) next to a jokey profile of a woman who seems doomed to marry only effeminate men (7.58); a bitter complaint against a noisy schoolmaster whose shouts wake him up early (school lessons started at dawn; 9.68) next to a shrewd criticism of a friend who’s always complaining the world is going to hell (9.70); a fond poem to a friend who’s mean and stingy but makes up for it by being a wonderful farter (10.15) next to the anecdote of the retired boatman who used his boat, filled with rocks, to plug a gap in the Tiber banks (10.85); a comic portrait of the superthief Hermogenes (12.28) next to a short but heartfelt summary of the Good Life (10.47). Variety.
There are a lot of poems about heirs and hangers-on waiting for the elderly to snuff it so they can inherit their money, a lot of anxiety about who cranky old people are favouring in their wills that’s reminiscent of Dickens:
If you were wise as well as rich and sickly
You’d see that every gift means, ‘Please die quickly!’
(8.27)
Or:
She longs for me to ‘have and hold’ her
In marriage. I’ve no mind to.
She’s old. If she were even older,
I might be half inclined to.
(10.8)
(In his fascinating introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Juvenal’s satires, Peter Green says this was an obsessive subject for authors of this generation. Professional legacy hunters were called captatores and he reminds me that an entire chapter of Petronius’s Satyricon describes a visit to a town entirely populated by legacy hunters.)
There’s a recurring theme criticising the kind of affected connoisseur who dismisses the moderns and only values ‘the Classics’, a type the elegiac poets also despised:
Rigidly classical, you save
Your praise for poets in the grave.
Forgive me, it’s not worth my while
Dying to earn your critical smile.
(8.69)
Michie devotes half his note to an impressionistic prose summary of the cumulative portrait of late-first century Roman locations and people which Martial’s epigrams depict, the Rome of:
shops, amphitheatres, law courts, lavatories, temples, schools, tenements, gardens, taverns, and public baths, its dusty of muddy streets filled with traffic, religious processions, , and never-ending business, its slaves, millionaires, prostitutes, philosophers, quacks, bores, touts, dinner-cadgers, fortune-hunters, poetasters, politicians and layabouts. (Introduction, page 9)
Michie makes the point that the epigrammatist, rather like the satirist, has to pretend to be angry and full of bile, but that a cumulative reading of Martial makes you suspect this was just a pose – or the kind of sentiment appropriate to the genre. For, as you work through these scores of short sharp vignettes, what actually comes over is Martial’s ‘great capacity for fun and for friendship, and an evergreen curiosity about people’.
Michie doesn’t mention Chaucer, but Martial shares Chaucer’s fascination with the huge diversity of real people of his time, their names and occupations, and shapes and sizes and ages and habits and mannerisms and verbal tics and sex lives and businesses. Thus a poem about typical scenes through the hours of the day:
The first two hours of the morning tax
Poor clients; during the third advocates wax
Eloquent and hoarse; until the fifth hour ends
The city to her various trades attends;
At six o’clock the weary workers stop
For the siesta; all Rome shuts up shop
At seven; the hour from eight to nine supplies
The oiled wrestlers with their exercise;
The ninth invites us to recline full length,
Denting the cushions. At last comes the tenth…
(Book 4, poem 8)
Michie also doesn’t mention Baudelaire, but you could draw the comparison between the French poet’s fascination with the endlessly teeming life of Paris, and Martial’s endless snapshots of life in what was, at the time, the biggest city in the world, with its extremes of poverty and luxury, power and enslavements, stinks and smells and endlessly fascinating inhabitants. Maybe the thronged novels of Balzac are a better comparison and, in England, Dickens.
Introduction
The introduction is written by historian and editor of Martial, Peter Howell, who makes a number of points:
Spanish writers
Martial was one of a generation of talented writers who hailed from the fully Romanised province of Hispania, which included Seneca the Elder and Younger; the latter’s nephew, Lucan; Quintilian; and Columella.
A career choice
In their writings both Martial and Juvenal give the impression that they were forced by a social system which made if impossible for middle-class, well-educated men to earn a living by respectable means to become the hangers-on and flatterers of the rich, living from hand to mouth. But this was largely false. Friends urged Martial to take up the law or stand for public office, but he turned down both options.
Patrons and clients
The relation of patron and client evolved during the history of Rome. At the beginning it meant the relationship between a full Roman citizen and foreigners who wanted favours done for them within the legal and political system. By Martial’s time a wealthy, well-connected patron prided himself on having large numbers of dependents, clients or hangers-on. The client acquired protection (for example, from lawsuits) and welfare (most often in the form of being invited to lavish dinners) but in return the patron claimed the client’s support, in law courts, at election time, at social events, and their general flattery at all times:
Labullus, I court you,
I escort you, I support you
By lending an ear to your chatter,
And everything you say or do I flatter…
(11.24)
Clients were expected to be at their patron’s house early in the morning to greet them, then accompany them on their day of social duties, at the end of the day receiving maybe a little cash, preferably an invite to dinner. (See poem 2.27 quoted below.)
Hence the many poems Martial writes about the lamentable plight of the humiliated client and the expressions ‘parasite’, ‘dinner cadger’ and ‘hanger-on’ which Michie uses to describe this social type, known in Latin (and in Roman theatre) as the parasitus.
For hours, for a whole day, he’ll sit
On every public toilet seat.
It’s not because he needs a shit:
He wants to be asked out to eat.
(11.77)
The parasite as poet
Martial was a cut above the average parasitus because he quite early became famous as a poet. The earliest surviving work of his is called Liber Spectaculorum, written to celebrate the opening of the Flavian amphitheatre (what came to be called the Colosseum) in 80 AD. But it was the terse, witty epigrams which he appeared to be able to knock out at will, many either flattering a specific client or appealing to their sense of humour, which kept him in free dinners for 35 years.
How Roman authors made money
A Roman author didn’t make money by selling copies of a work. Copies had to be written out by hand and so remained limited in number. Instead there appear to have been two sources of income for an author:
Dedicate your work to a patron who would respond in kind with gifts – the ultimate patron being the emperor, the classic example being Augustus who worked through his minister, Maecenas, to give both Virgil and Horace gifts of property, land and slaves which made them comfortable for life.
It seems that some notable ‘publishers’ would pay an author for the privilege of having first dibs at copying a work they estimated would be popular and which they could guarantee selling copies of.
Thus by the time he came to publish what is conventionally known as Epigrams Book 1, in about 85, Martial must have been writing poetry for about 20 years and so is able to refer to himself as well known, even if all the other works he was known for, appear to have disappeared.
A Roman book
When all these authors refer to what is translated into English as ‘a book’, they mean a cylindrical roll of papyrus whose ends were often smoothed with pumice-stone and the whole roll wrapped in vellum (note, page 192). The wooden stave round which the papyrus was wrapped often had carved knobs at each end to secure the roll and make it easier to handle. The back of the papyrus was dyed yellow with cedar oil to preserve it from mould and moths (note, page 196). According to poem 1.117 a ‘book’ of Martial’s cost 5 dinarii.
Reasons for Martial’s popularity
Most contemporary poetry was long and long-winded, written about stock mythological subjects in elaborate and stylised verse. Thus Virgil’s Aeneid gave rise to poets who tried to ape his success with long epics such as Valerius Flaccus, Statius and Silius Italicus.
By contrast Martial developed a form which was not just short but very short, but which managed to create drama in a very small number of lines (sometimes as few as two lines). Despite their shortness the epigrams, when collected into books, were arranged to offer a pleasing sense of variety and range.
Martial’s epigrams are sometimes contrived in the sense of carefully structured to make a joke or damning point; but never contrived in the sense of striving to be grand and pompous. They are never pretentious.
No real people are skewered
The short poems of Catullus are packed with gleeful abuse of real individuals. The satires of his friend and contemporary, Juvenal, very much flay real life individuals, albeit under pseudonyms. But Martial, scathing though some of them may be, categorically states that he has not satirised any real people, even under fictitious names. Hence the large number of characters in the poem named Flaccus and Labulla and Lesbia and Cinna and Galla and Postumus. They’re just bland common names used as pegs for the jokes.
Obscenity
Many of the poems are what used to be called ‘obscene’ and still was at the date of this translation (1964). In one of the first poems he uses the same argument that Catullus and Ovid had, namely that although his verse may be pornographic his life is pure.
Roman sexual attitudes
The attitude towards sex that emerges from Martial is one of cheerful permissiveness but not wild and orgiastic promiscuousness. (Introduction, p.16)
Sex is acceptable (unlike in, say, Victorian England) and prostitution is widespread. Adultery is theoretically forbidden but in practice also widespread. Homosexuality and bisexuality are regarded as natural, especially with teenage boys. The active role in male gay sex was through acceptable but for an adult man to take the passive role was more shameful. Poem 12.75 is an amusing squib listing all the types of gay boys he’d prefer to ‘some bitch/Who’d make me miserably rich’ (12.75). The poem about the woman who weighs men’s penises erect and flaccid (10.55) is amusing but the long one complaining that his ‘wife’ isn’t sexually adventurous enough is genuinely funny because so outrageous (11.104).
Domitian
Howell entertainingly speaks up for the emperor Domitian (reigned 81 to 96). He says that Domitian had (as of 1964) the reputation of a Hitler (!) but claims this is the result of the works of Tacitus, Juvenal and ‘other biased writers’. Apart from his paranoid vendetta against the senatorial class (which Tacitus and Juvenal and the other biased writers wrote for) Howell claims Domitian’s rule was for everyone else ‘calm and prosperous, marked by beneficial social and moral legislation’ (p.16).
But Domitian liked Martial and awarded him the privileges of a father of 3 children although Martial was never, as far as we know, actually married and had no children. Hence Martial’s numerous poems sucking up to Domitian (as Virgil and Horace and Ovid shamelessly sucked up to Augustus) (I especially like the panegyric to the imperial fish, 4.30); although Howell disapproves of how, following Domitian’s assassination in 96, Martial quickly knocked off poems saying he’d never liked him anyway and praising the new regime.
Rhyming couplets
The great majority of Martial’s poems were written in elegiac couplets, one hexameter followed by a pentameter, such as we’ve encountered in all the elegiac poets (Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid). The most important single thing about Michie’s translation is he chooses to translate every poem he selects into rhyming couplets, quatrains or other rhyming forms. The precise metre varies from poem to poem, but pretty much all of them rhyme.
It’s a bold decision. It aligns Michie’s versions with the rhyming couplets of the Augustan Age of English verse, very roughly from the 1680s to the 1750s. On the upside rhyme in English poetry creates opportunity for humour and often prompts the author to ingeniously amusing collocations. Rhyme is associated with limericks and light verse of all types. On the down side, ‘serious’ modern poetry abandoned rhyme around the time of the First World War so the solid use of rhyme for all the translations signals and lack of…a lack of seriousness or depth, which, from what both Howell and Miche say about Martial, is maybe not appropriate in every instance.
The epigrams
There are all kinds of ways of grouping and categorising them, starting with the 12 books which Martial himself used as a structuring device. Very broadly there are two types of Martial epigram – ones you ‘get’, which have an appealing twist or sting or point which you can understand; and those which don’t have such an obvious payoff, which presumably made sense in their time but seem flat or pointless or even incomprehensible to us today, even with extensive notes. If a joke needs extensive notes to explain it, it isn’t a very good joke.
Themes
The poet as celebrity and showman
May I present myself – the man
You read, admire and long to meet,
Known the world over for his neat
And witty epigrams? The name
Is Martial. Thank you, earnest fan,
For having granted me the fame
Seldom enjoyed by a dead poet
While I’m alive and here to know it.
(Book 1, poem 1)
Insufferable amateur poets
Whether or not Apollo fled from the table
Thyestes ate his sons at, I’m unable
To say: what I can vouch for is our wish
To escape your dinner parties. Though each dish
Is lavish and superb, the pleasure’s nil Since you recite your poems! To hell with brill,
Mushrooms and two-pound turbots, I don’t need
Oysters: give me a host who doesn’t read.
(3.45)
To Domitian, pleading his moral probity
Caesar, if you should chance to handle my book,
I hope that you’ll relax the frowning look
That rules the world. Soldiers are free to mock
The triumphs of you emperors – there’s no shame
In a general being made a laughing-stock.
I beg you, read my verses with the same
Face as you watch Latinus on the stage
Or Thymele the dancer. Harmless wit
You may, as Censor, reasonably permit:
My life is strict, however lax my page.
(1.4)
Heterosexual sex
Lesbia, why are your amours
Always conducted behind open, unguarded doors?
Why do you get more excitement out of a voyeur than a lover?
Why is pleasure no pleasure when it’s under cover?
Whores us a curtain, a bolt or a porter
To bar the public – you won’t find many chinks in the red-light quarter.
Ask Chione or Ias how to behave:
Even the cheapest tart conceals her business inside a monumental grave.
If I seem too hard on you, remember my objection
Is not to fornication, but to detection.
(1.34)
‘inside a monumental grave‘?
Gay sex
I think what’s going on is the narrator is buggering a boy who, as a result, is on the edge of orgasm. I’m happy to be corrected if I’ve misunderstood.
When you say, ‘Quick, I’m going to come,’
Hedylus, I go limp and numb.
But ask me to hold back my fire,
And the brake accelerates desire.
Dear boy, if you’re in such a hurry,
Tell me to slow up, not to worry.
(1.46)
Slave or paedophile sex
The eroticism of being blocked or prevented is taken a step further in this poem:
The only kisses I enjoy
Are those I take by violence, boy.
Your anger whets my appetite
More than your face, and so to excite
Desire I give you a good beating
From time to time: a self-defeating
Habit – what do I do it for?
You neither fear nor love me more.
(5.46)
Heterosexual smears
Lesbia claims she’s never laid
Without good money being paid.
That’s true enough; when she’s on fire
She’ll always pay the hose’s hire.
(11.62)
Thumbnail sketches
Diaulus, recently physician,
Has set up now as a mortician:
No change, though, in his clients’ condition.
(1.47)
Or:
You’re an informer and a tool for slander,
A notorious swindler and a pander,
A cocksucker, gangster and a whore…
So how is it, Vacerra, you’re so poor?
(11.66)
Chaucerian physicality
Hoping, Fescennia, to overpower
The reek of last night’s drinking, you devour
Cosmus’ sweet-scented pastilles by the gross.
But though they give your teeth a whitish gloss
They fail to make your breath any less smelly
When a belch bubbles up from your abyss-like belly.
In fact, blended with the lozenges, it’s much stronger;
It travels farther and it lingers longer.
(1.87)
His cheap lodgings in a block of flats
Lupercus, whenever you meet me
You instantly greet me
With, ‘Is it alright by you if I send
My slave to pick up your book of epigrams? It’s only to lend:
I’ll return it when I’ve read it.’ There’s no call
To trouble your boy. It’s a long haul
To the Pear-tree district, and my flat
Is up three flights of stairs, steep ones at that…
(1.117)
Behaviour of a hanger-on and dinner cadger
When Selius spreads his nets for an invitation
To dinner, if you’re due to plead a cause
In court or give a poetry recitation,
Take him along, he’ll furnish your applause:
‘Well said!’ ‘Hear, hear!’ ‘Bravo!’ ‘Shrewd point!’ ‘That’s good!’
Till you say, ‘Shut up now, you’ve earned your food.’
(2.27)
Or this poem about not only being a client, but being a client’s client.
I angle for your dinner invitations (oh the shame
Of doing it, but I do it). You fish elsewhere. We’re the same.
I attend the morning levée and they tell me you’re not there,
But gone to wait on someone else. We make a proper pair.
I’m your spaniel, I’m the toady to your every pompous whim.
You court a richer patron. I dog you and you dog him.
To be a slave is bad enough but I refuse to be
A flunkey’s flunkey, Maximum. My master must be free.
(2.18)
Miniatures of abuse
You ask me what I get
Out of my country place.
The profit, gross or net,
Is never having to see your face.
(2.38)
And:
Marius’s earhole smells.
Does that surprise you, Nestor?
The scandal that you tell’s
Enough to make it fester.
(3.28)
Crude humour
If from the baths you hear a round of applause
Maron’s giant prick is bound to be the cause.
(9.33)
Or:
Why poke the ash of a dead fire?
Why pluck the hairs from your grey fanny?
That’s a chic touch that men admire
In girls, not in a flagrant granny…
(10.90)
Sarcasm about his readers
Caedicianus, if my reader
After a hundred epigrams still
Wants more, then he’s a greedy feeder
Whom no amount of swill can fill.
(1.118)
Self portrait in retirement
Poor morning client (you remind me
Of all I loathed and left behind me
In Rome), if you had any nous,
Instead of calling on my house
You’d haunt the mansions of the great.
I’m not some wealthy advocate
Blessed with a sharp, litigious tongue,
I’m just a lazy, far from young
Friend of the Muses who likes ease
And sleep. Great Rome denied me these:
If I can’t find them here in Spain,
I might as well go back again.
(12.68)
Credit
The Epigrams of Martial, translated by James Michie with an introduction by Peter Howell, was published by Penguin Books in 1973.
FAINALL: If it must all come out, why let ’em know it, ’tis but the way of the world.
From a historical point of view, the most interesting thing about The Way of The World is that it was not well received. It was an attempt to continue the Restoration comedy conventions of aristocratic libertinage into what had become, by 1700, a new world of mercantile, bourgeois respectability. Its studied cynicism felt out of date.
MIRABELL: I say that a man may as soon make a friend by his wit, or a fortune by his honesty, as win a woman with plain-dealing and sincerity.
To quote the excellent Wikipedia article:
The tolerance for Restoration comedy even in its modified form was running out at the end of the 17th century, as public opinion turned to respectability and seriousness even faster than the playwrights did. Interconnected causes for this shift in taste were demographic change, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, William’s and Mary’s dislike of the theatre, and the lawsuits brought against playwrights by the Society for the Reformation of Manners (founded in 1692). When Jeremy Collier attacked Congreve and Vanbrugh in his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage in 1698, he was confirming a shift in audience taste that had already taken place. [The Short View is actually mentioned by name in The Way of the World, act 3, scene 2]. At the much-anticipated all-star première in 1700 of The Way of the World, Congreve’s first comedy for five years, the audience showed only moderate enthusiasm for that subtle and almost melancholy work. The comedy of sex and wit was about to be replaced by the drama of obvious sentiment and exemplary morality. (Restoration comedy Wikipedia article)
The cast
The names, as usual, include some comic inventions which immediately raise a smile e.g. Petulant, Foible and Mincing. But the profiles are thin compared to some other cast lists I’ve read.
THE MEN
Fainall – in love with Mrs. Marwood
Mirabell – in love with Mrs. Millamant
Witwoud – follower of Mrs. Millamant
Petulant – follower of Mrs. Millamant
Sir Wilfull Witwoud – half brother to Witwoud, and nephew to Lady Wishfort
Waitwell – servant to Mirabell
THE WOMEN
Lady Wishfort – enemy to Mirabell, for having falsely pretended love to her
Mrs. Millamant – a fine lady, niece to Lady Wishfort, and loves Mirabell
Mrs. Marwood – friend to Mr. Fainall, and likes Mirabell
Mrs. Fainall – daughter to Lady Wishfort, and wife to Fainall, formerly friend to Mirabell
Foible – woman to Lady Wishfort
Mincing – woman to Mrs. Millamant
Overall plot summary
Mirabell and Mrs Millamant are in love. Mrs Millamant’s vain aunt and guardian, old (55) Lady Wishfort, is preventing their marriage as revenge on Mirabell for having pretended to be in love with her. Mrs Millamant is set to inherit a fortune from old Lady Wishfort, so long as she marries with that lady’s approval. Mrs Millamant loves Mirabell but pretends not to.
Mrs Millamant is also wooed by two silly lovers, Witwoud and Petulant, who cordially dislike each other and are the butt of countless jokes by the much cleverer Mirabell and Fainall.
Mirabell devises a plot (‘a matter of some sort of mirth’) to embarrass Lady Wishfort, who is eager to get a husband. Mirabell persuades his servant, Waitwell, to dress up as his uncle, Sir Rowland, and woo Lady Wishfort. (Waitwell has been married that day to Lady Wishfort’s waiting woman, Foible.) Mirabell hopes that when Lady Wishfort realizes how foolish she has been in a) nearly committing bigamy b) the social disgrace of being wooed by a servant – that she will give permission for the marriage of Mirabell and Mrs Millamant – and also part with the fortune she controls.
Money, as always, is a key element to the plot.
This is the main plot. There are other characters and incidents involving marriage and money. Lady Wishfort’s daughter is married to Fainall, Mirabell’s confidant and sidekick. Fainall, besides sparking off Mirabell, is having an affair with Mrs. Marwood.
Also dominating sections of the play is the sub-plot about the prospective husband who Lady Wishfort has selected for Mrs Millamant, namely her nephew Sir Wilfull Witwoud (half-brother to the other Witwoud).
There are other admirers of both Mirabell and Mrs Millamant. Possibly the least sympathetic character is Mr. Fainall, son-in-law of Lady Wishfort and lover of Mrs. Marwood, who goes from being Mirabell’s ‘friend’ to becoming his bitter vengeful enemy.
More detailed plot summary
Act 1 A chocolate house Mirabell and Fainall have just finished playing cards. A footman comes and tells Mirabell that Waitwell (Mirabell’s male servant) and Foible (Lady Wishfort’s female servant) were married that morning. Mirabell tells Fainall about his love of Mrs Millamant, Fainall explains the ladies love meeting in a women-only ‘cabal’.
Witwoud appears and demonstrates what a fool he is:
WITWOUD: My dear, I ask ten thousand pardons. Gad, I have forgot what I was going to say to you.
Our heroes get Witwoud to insult his supposed friend, Petulant, in his absence. He reveals the extraordinary fact that Petulant sometimes arranges for himself to be ‘called’ by friends when he’s in a pub, so as to appear popular. Then Petulant appears and there is more comic business, but not before Petulant has announced he hears that Mirabell’s uncle, Sir Rowland, has arrived in town.
Witwoud and Petulant announce they will go for a stroll round St James’s Park and Mirabell draws out the uncouthness of their manners; they think being rude and coarse enough to gentlewomen to make them blush is an achievement, what they call being severe.
Act 2 St. James’ Park Mrs. Fainall and Mrs. Marwood are discussing their hatred of men. Fainall and Mirabell appear and while Mrs F and Mirabell walk ahead, Fainall accuses Mrs. Marwood (with whom he is having an affair) of loving Mirabell (which she does). They have a terrific argument, with her threatening to tell everyone and his wife that they’ve been having an affair – leading her to burst into tears and he to apologise profusely. Not very funny.
Continuing the theme of unhappy marriage, Mrs. Fainall (Mirabell’s former lover) tells Mirabell that she hates her husband, Fainall, and then they begin to plot to deceive Lady Wishfort into giving her consent to the marriage.
MRS. FAINALL: So, if my poor mother is caught in a contract, you will discover the imposture betimes, and release her by producing a certificate of her gallant’s former marriage.
MIRABELL: Yes, upon condition that she consent to my marriage with her niece, and surrender the moiety of her fortune in her possession.
Enter Mrs Millamant accompanied by the fool, Witwoud, and her servant, Mincing. Some funny lines:
WITWOUD: I confess I do blaze to-day; I am too bright.
and:
WITWOUD: Pray, madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters? I find I must keep copies.
MILLAMENT: Only with those in verse, Mr. Witwoud. I never pin up my hair with prose. I think I tried once.
MINCING (her maid): O mem, I shall never forget it.
Mrs Millament is very angry and cynical about mankind, love etc. She perplexes Mirabell with a parting shot that she knows about his ‘plan’. How the devil does she know that?
Enter the newly-wed servants Waitwell and Foible. Congreve does write funny lines:
MIRABELL: Waitwell, why, sure, you think you were married for your own recreation and not for my conveniency!
Mirabell reminds them of their roles in the plan, namely Foible will tell Lady Wishfort that Mirabell’s rich uncle, Sir Rowland, has arrived in town, and Waitwell will then dress in disguise and pretend to be Sir Rowland.
Act 3 Lady Wishfort’s house We’ve had to wait till the third act to meet the ogre, Lady Wishfort. We are introduced in a comic scene with Lady Wishfort and the maid, Foible, who struggles to manage her hair, her makeup (and her booze). Foible exits while Lady Wishfort talks to Mrs Marwood, who mentions she saw Foible just now in St James Park with Mirabell.
Foible returns and commences the Mirabell’s plan – telling Lady Wishfort that the newly-arrived Sir Rowland is interested in her. Lady Wishfort brings up the matter of Foible being seen with Mirabell but Foible thinks quickly on her feet and says Mirabell was calling Wishfort a super-annuated old so-and-so which so infuriates Lady Wishfort that she ceases to be suspicious. Then regrets frowning and raging, has her makeup been affected? Foible has a funny line:
FOIBLE: Your ladyship has frowned a little too rashly, indeed, madam. There are some cracks discernible in the white varnish.
LADY WISHFORT: Let me see the glass. Cracks, say’st thou? Why, I am arrantly flayed: I look like an old peeled wall. Thou must repair me, Foible, before Sir Rowland comes.
Exit Lady Wishfort and enter Mrs Fainall who reveals to Foible that she knows about the whole plan. They both depart but they have been overheard in turn by Mrs Marwood, who now knows about the scheme and the parts everyone is playing.
Mrs Marwood and Mrs MIllamant both lie to each other about how much they hate men and Mirabell in particular.
MRS. MARWOOD: I detest him, hate him, madam.
MRS MILLAMANT: O madam, why, so do I. And yet the creature loves me, ha, ha, ha! How can one forbear laughing to think of it?
Sir Wilful Witwoud arrives, a booming 40-year-old countryman who embarrasses his would-be foppish brother and ridicules his foppish appearance and speech.
WITWOUD: Why, brother Wilfull of Salop, you may be as short as a Shrewsbury cake, if you please. But I tell you ’tis not modish to know relations in town. You think you’re in the country, where great lubberly brothers slabber and kiss one another when they meet, like a call of sergeants. ’Tis not the fashion here; ’tis not, indeed, dear brother.
Mrs Marwood has told The Plan to Fainall as well as the fact that Mrs Fainall was once Mirabell’s mistress. He is doubly angry at his ‘friend’ a) for cuckolding him b) if Mirabell marries Mrs Millamant, Fainall’s wife will be deprived of Lady Wishfort’s legacy, and so Fainall will be worse off. (I think.)
Fainall rants against his wife, declares he never loved her, tells Mrs. Marwood he’ll get his wife’s money and go off with her (Mrs M). He kisses Mrs Marwood.
Act 4 Mirabell and Mrs Millamant discuss in detail the conditions under which they would accept each other in marriage. This has become known as The Proviso Scene and a) the frankness with which they discuss marriage as a business arrangement and b) the equality with which they do so i.e. the man isn’t dictating to the woman, they both approach the negotiation as equals, has meant the scene is referenced not only in books about Restoration comedy, but is often referenced in social histories of the period.
In fact during the scene they also reveal their the depth of feeling for each other. The scene leads up to Mirabell finally proposing to Mrs Millamant and, with Mrs. Fainall’s encouragement (almost consent, as Mrs Millamant knows of Mirabell’s and Mrs F’s previous relationship), Mrs Millamant accepts.
Mirabell leaves as Lady Wishfort arrives. She is flustered by all these people arriving at her house, including Sir Wilfull Witwoud, and she wonders how to receive him. Witwoud and Petulant reel in having got drunk with the country cousin. Sir Wilfull is carrying on getting very drunk and, according to Mrs Millamant, stinks (‘He has a breath like a bagpipe’).
Drunk Sir Wilfull is led away in time for Lady Wishfort to receive the pretended Sir Rowland who is, of course, Mirabell’s servant in a disguise. He pretends to be a brave braggadochio and when he hears that Mirabell has in a little way been wooing Lady W, he threatens to draw his sword and run him through!
The scene is notable for the way Lady Wishfort uses comically elaborate diction and Sir Rowland is bombastic.
LADY WISHFORT: No, don’t kill him at once, Sir Rowland: starve him gradually, inch by inch.
WAITWELL: I’ll do’t. In three weeks he shall be barefoot; in a month out at knees with begging an alms; he shall starve upward and upward, ’till he has nothing living but his head, and then go out in a stink like a candle’s end upon a save-all.
LADY WISHFORT: Well, Sir Rowland, you have the way,—you are no novice in the labyrinth of love,—you have the clue. But as I am a person, Sir Rowland, you must not attribute my yielding to any sinister appetite or indigestion of widowhood; nor impute my complacency to any lethargy of continence. I hope you do not think me prone to any iteration of nuptials?
This leads into a clever comic sequence: Sir Rowland has just begun wooing Lady Wishfort when a letter arrives from Mrs Marwood which Lady Wishfort starts reading aloud – and it explains that the man claiming to be Sir Rowland is an imposter!
Waitwell/Sir Rowland panics but his wife (and Lady Wishfort’s maid) Foible, tells him to seize the letter and face down the situation – so Waitwell/Sir Rowland seizes the letter from Lady Wishfort in mid-reading, and claims it is a hoax sent by Mirabell, a vain attempt to discredit Sir Rowland and retain his legacy, and – still in character – Waitwell/Rowland threatens to cut his throat, damn his eyes etc, and storms out to get a marriage contract for himself and Lady Wishfort to be married that night.
The interaction of the three, and especially Foible’s whispered asides to Waitwell, and then her spoken and feigned shock to Lady Wishfort, are all very funny. Incidentally an example of a woman (Foible) being far more quick-witted and clever than her man (Waitwell).
Act 5 There’s a sudden jump in the plot. Somehow Lady Wishfort has found out about The Plan and the act opens with her furiously denouncing Foible for her part in it and threatening to send her back to the slums where she found her.
And in fact she is entirely justified in being furious at discovering that her own pampered servant was exploiting her and exposing her to ridicule.
Lady Wishfort exits and Foible explains everything to Mrs Fainall i.e. Mrs Marwood revealed The Plan to Lady Wishfort who has sent to have Waitwell arrested. It was Mrs Marwood who revealed to Mrs Fainall that Mrs Fainall had once been unfaithful with Mirabell. But in this conversation, Foible also reveals that the servants once caught Mrs Marwood in a night of passion with Mirabell. Aha!
Enter Lady Wishfort with Mrs. Marwood, whom she thanks for unveiling the plot, but Mrs Fainall argues fiercely that she is not guilty and not to blame. There is an extended passage where Lady Wishfort describes Mrs Fainall’s childhood and how they took extreme care to make sure she was never exposed to boys or men or any kind of temptation (the theatre etc). I didn’t quite understand what it is Mrs Fainall is supposed to have done which is so ruinous: is it to have had some kind of fling with Meribell?
Enter Fainall who uses the information of Mrs. Fainall’s previous affair with Mirabell, and Mrs Millamant’s contract to marry Mirabell, to blackmail Lady Wishfort. Mr Fainall orders Lady Wishfort that a) she is forbidden to marry b) her daughter i.e. Mrs Fainall, shall immediately make over to him the remainder of her fortune.
MR FAINALL: Lastly, I will be endowed, in right of my wife, with that six thousand pound, which is the moiety of Mrs. Millamant’s fortune in your possession, and which she has forfeited (as will appear by the last will and testament of your deceased husband, Sir Jonathan Wishfort) by her disobedience in contracting herself against your consent or knowledge, and by refusing the offered match with Sir Wilfull Witwoud, which you, like a careful aunt, had provided for her.
Fainall exits to give Lady Wishfort time to consider his demands.
Enter Mrs Millamant who declares that she has heard that The Plot is revealed, apologises for her part in it and is ready to marry Sir Wilfull. They call in Mirabell who throws himself at Lady Wishfort’s feet and abjectly asks, not even for forgiveness, but for Pity.
Re-enter Fainall still insisting on his demands; the blackmail threat is otherwise he will tell all the town about Mrs Fainall’s infidelity. But Lady Wishfort has been a little touched by Meribell’s pleading (and so has drunk Sir Wilfull who threatens to draw his sword and chop up Fainall’s document.)
At this critical juncture, Mirabell hints that he might have a way of saving Lady Wishfort’s fortune and her daughter’s reputation. Lady Wishfort says she’ll give anything, anything for that to happen; even the hand of Mrs Millamant in marriage.
Mirabell then presents two witnesses. First Mincing and then Foible confirm that Mrs Marwood is in love with Fainall, and that they conspired this whole thing together, Mincing adding that they found them in bed together. But this doesn’t address the main point – it discredits the pair but is no solution.
Then Mirabell presents his second trick. Waitwell brings in a black box which contains a legal document, witnessed by Witwoud and Petulant, whereby Mrs Fainall, while she was still a widow and before she married Fainall, signed “A Deed of Conveyance of the whole estate real of Arabella Languish, widow in trust to Edward Mirabell“.
In other words – it is not in Lady Wishfort’s power to give her daughter’s money to Mr Fainall, it is already legally pledged to Mirabell – and so Fainall’s blackmail scheme collapses!
He makes a rush as if to attack Mrs Fainall, but bold Sir Wilfull steps between. Fainall and Mrs Marwood depart, utterly crushed and vowing revenge.
MRS. FAINALL: Thank Mr. Mirabell, a cautious friend, to whose advice all is owing.
Lady Wishfort forgives her maid, Foible, and Mirabell’s servant Waitwell. And Mirabell is thanked by getting the hand in marriage of Mrs Millamant and the full £12,000 inheritance.
The way of the world
Congreve sprinkles references to the title throughout the text, using various incidents in the play to justify it.
FAINALL: Why, then, Foible’s a bawd, an errant, rank match-making bawd. And I, it seems, am a husband, a rank husband, and my wife a very errant, rank wife,—all in the way of the world.
FAINALL: If it must all come out, why let ’em know it, ’tis but the way of the world.
FAINALL: Very likely, sir. What’s here? Damnation! [Reads] ‘A Deed of Conveyance of the whole estate real of Arabella Languish, widow, in trust to Edward Mirabel’l. Confusion!
MIRABELL: Even so, sir: ’tis the way of the world, sir.
But things are not so just because a writer says so. The claim that the way of the world involves adultery and faithless spouses or the humiliating revelation of embarrassing secrets or the overthrow of all your plans in ‘confusion!’ is neither a proof nor a truth.
It is just a rhetorical reinforcement of the cynical worldview the Restoration comedies demanded. In a way, the more his characters claim that that kind of behaviour is ‘the way of the world’, the less it feels like it. The more it feels like the outdated worldview of a bygone era.
Conclusion
For some reason I liked this play. I warmed to the rural boisterousness of Sir Wilfull Witwoud, and the scene where Sir Rowland is found out is very well done. The squabbling between Witwoud and Petulant is mildly diverting. Lady Wishfort’s pretentious diction when being wooed by the fake Sir Rowland is funny.
The way the entire play revolves around one Great Plan gives it simplicity and purity. But there are, I think, two objections:
1. The Great Reversal in the last act shares the weakness of all Restoration comedies, that it feels contrived. Right at the very very end it turns out that the fate of almost everyone depends on that one legal document, the deed of conveyance, a deus ex machina, a rabbit pulled out of a hat.
In the theatre it may work well as a sudden and dramatic revelation – but as you go away and think about it, it is an extraordinary vision that an entire set of human lives and loves are made to hang on one legal document. And that Mirabell knew about it all along and didn’t tell anyone he had this one-stop solution!
The more you think about it, the more contrived and unsatisfactory this feels.
2. I can’t overcome a nagging sense that the characters are all unpleasant. Fainall is meant to be Mirabell’s friend but quickly becomes an unpleasant, exploitative enemy. Mrs Marwood is just a graceless Iago, a fount of hate. Lady Wishfort is a crabbed, pretentious old lady. Mrs Millamant, for me, never comes to life. Maybe part of the reason the Provision Scene is remembered is because it’s one of the few scenes where she comes to life. They’re just not a very likeable crew.
Restoration clichés
Restoration comedies are all stuffed with the same old cynical clichés about men, women, marriage, poets, fops, lovers, cuckolds, mistresses and so on. Rather than ‘the way of the world’, they present an endless iteration of a small number of ideas about a narrow range of persons. A few of them are given more than usually memorable expression in this play:
Men
MRS. FAINALL: Is it possible? Dost thou hate those vipers, men?
MRS. MARWOOD: I have done hating ’em, and am now come to despise ’em; the next thing I have to do is eternally to forget ’em.
The country
MRS MILLAMANT: I nauseate walking: ’tis a country diversion; I loathe the country and everything that relates to it.
‘I will deceive ’em all, and yet secure myself…This double-dealing is a jewel.’
(thoughts of the Double Dealer himself, the villainous Jack Maskwell)
After the smash hit success of his first play, The Old Bachelor, Congreve quickly followed up with his second play, The Double Dealer, performed later the same year (1693).
It is an experimental play, quite a bold move for a young man of 23. What makes it experimental is that the action is set almost entirely in just one place, namely A gallery in the Lord Touchwood’s house, with chambers adjoining.
In the dedication to the printed version of the play, Congreve explicitly says he set out to observe Aristotle’s three unities, unity of time and place and subject matter, to produce what he describes as ‘a true and regular comedy’.
The so-called unities derive from Aristotle’s work The Art of Poetry or Poetics, written around 335 BC. In this text Aristotle analysed the successful plays of ancient Greece to see what they had in common and deduced some common features they shared, that:
most of them concern just one subject uncluttered by sub-plots or digressions
they all take place in one location
and they all tale place in the space of at most a day, often often in ‘real time’ i.e. over the same amount of time that the play takes to perform and watch i.e. about three hours.
In Aristotle’s book these three ‘unities’ are the results of an empirical analysis of the plays that had been written up to his time. In the hands of later critics and theorists they were turned into ‘rules’ which good drama must obey, especially in France and especially in the 17th century.
And it was from contemporary French writers that Congreve took the idea of the unities and, indeed, some of these French critics (le Bossu, Rapin and Dacier) are mentioned in the play itself – albeit the reference is given to the pretentious bubblebrain Lady Froth and so played for laughs. (I wonder whether this is because the idea was seen as frenchified and pretentious…)
Anyway, in the dedicatory letter to the printed edition, Congreve is explicit about his wish to fulfil them, saying he ‘was resolved to preserve the three unities of the drama’. The Double Dealer is a playwright’s experiment at using Aristotle’s three unities in the composition of a Restoration comedy.
We’ve mentioned how The Double Dealer fulfils unities of time and place (almost all set in the long gallery at Lord Touchwood’s house, and taking place on just one evening) – but the unity of subject matter?
The classic Greek plays were extremely sparse and pure. Restoration comedy, by contrast, made a virtue of building up a labyrinth of complex plots and sub-plots, with the characters themselves hatching schemes, putting on disguises, and carrying out endless cons and scams. So you’d have thought that unity of subject was a non-starter for a playwright working in the genre Congreve was engaged in, yet that is not his opinion.
I made the plot as strong as I could because it was single, and I made it single because I would avoid confusion, and was resolved to preserve the three unities of the drama.
Is it single? Maybe he’s referring to the way everything in the plot stems from just one event, the planned marriage – the next day – of Mellefont and Cynthia, and the way the play then proceeds to engender numerous plots (and counter-plots) they all spring, at root, from that one theme.
Well, so much for the theory he expounds in the preface – how much does it work in practice?
CAST
Men Maskwell, a villain; pretended friend to Mellefont, gallant to Lady Touchwood, and in love with Cynthia
Lord Touchwood, uncle to Mellefort
Mellefont, promised to, and in love with Cynthia
Careless, his friend
Lord Froth, a solemn coxcomb
Brisk, a pert coxcomb
Sir Paul Plyant, an uxorious, foolish old knight; brother to Lady Touchwood, and father to Cynthia
Women Lady Touchwood, in love with Mellefont
Cynthia, daughter to Sir Paul by a former wife, promised to Mellefont
Lady Froth, a great coquette; pretender to poetry, wit, and learning
Lady Plyant, insolent to her husband, and easy to any pretender
Music
As with The Old Bachelor, the incidental music and settings of songs were written by Henry Purcell.
NB Scene divisions The Penguin paperback edition of the four plays of William Congreve is very light on scene division, dividing acts into 2 or 3 scenes at most, based on a change of location.
By contrast, the Project Gutenberg online edition – which is itself a facsimile of the edition edited by critic G.S. Street at the very end of the 19th century – indicates the start of a new scene every time the personnel on stage change i.e. when anyone exits or enters. Since people are continually coming and going in Restoration comedies, this means there can be as many as 25 ‘scenes’ in each act.
To begin with I summarised the play just in paragraphs addressing the main plot or character developments. But in Act 4, I switched to using Street’s notation, copying his ‘scene’ numbers, even when they indicated that a character was alone onstage for only a couple of sentences.
I did it as an experiment to see if it makes my text more or less readable. I think it makes it slightly more disjointed and maybe harder to read. On the other hand, it means the reader (you) gets definitive information about who is on stage, or leaving or entering, at every moment of the play.
Which layout do you prefer?
Act 1
Introduces the location – A gallery in the Lord Touchwood’s house, with chambers adjoining – key characters and the set-up. A formal dinner is taking place.
Male characters Mellefont is the male lead. His sidekick is Careless. There is a shallow fop who fails to see how crude and tactless he is, named Brisk. Lord Touchwood, whose home they’re in, is Mellefont’s uncle. Mellefont is engaged to the daughter of Sir Paul Plyant, who is a guest at the dinner. They are scheduled to be married the following morning. Other male guests include the pert coxcomb Brisk and the solemn coxcomb, Lord Froth (‘But there is nothing more unbecoming a man of quality than to laugh; ’tis such a vulgar expression of the passion; everybody can laugh…when I laugh, I always laugh alone.’) And also there is a fellow rake on Mellefont and Careless’s level, Jack Maskwell.
Female characters The ladies attending the dinner are Lord Touchwood’s wife, who has a secret passion for Mellefont. Cynthia, the daughter of Sir Paul Plyant who is engaged to Mellefont. Sir Paul’s wife and Cynthia’s mother, the lascivious Lady Plyant, and the solemn coxcomb Lord Froth’s wife, the pretentious Lady Froth.
The play opens with Mellefont following Careless out into the gallery. Dinner is over. The menfolk are in one room, presumably the dining room, while the women have retired to another room at the end of the gallery for tea and gossip.
Careless is fed up of the men’s guzzling and senseless words and so was going to pay the women a visit. Mellefont catches up with him and says he has something important to tell him but at exactly that moment they are interrupted by Brisk who has also followed Careless from the dining room and now makes a display if thinking himself a grand and clever fellow, using elaborate metaphors which he then points out – which the other two put up with, and the audience laugh at, till he’s dispatched back to the dining room.
It’s very important to all these plays that the lead characters are established as being on an upper plane of wit and sophistication. They all use the same technique to establish this which is to include at least one pretentious, high-falutin and idiotic fop to show how not to do it – how wit and style easily degenerate into clever-clever mannerisms and pretentious speech which at the same time fails to understand what is going on. In a way it’s a most important dynamic than the more obvious one of that between the sexes. Through this simple device the audience is invited to identify with the two clever lead figures (it’s always two, the minimum number which allows dialogue) and to share in their mocking scorn of the stupid fop figure.
The plays are designed to make the audience feel superior and clever.
Mellefont reveals that Lady Touchwood came to his bedroom and made an advance to him, which he rejected, since when she has taken a furious hatred of him and is doing everything she can to undermine his reputation with Sir Paul, his prospective father-in-law. Therefore Mellefont asks Careless if he will woo Lady Plyant to take up her time and ensure she isn’t influenced against the marriage by wicked Lady Touchwood. Lord and Lady Froth will be too busy admiring each other and the idiot Brisk. Mellefont will keep an eye on his uncle, Lord Touchwood, and Jack Maskwell has promised to keep a watch on Lady Touchwood.
But as his name, and the cast list, indicate, Maskwell is ‘a villain’ working directly against Mellefont’s interests, who is prepared to egg on Lady Touchwood’s malice, because he himself is in love with Mellefont’s fiancee, Cynthia. Though Mellefont thinks he is a trusted friend, Careless quickly explains that he (Careless) doesn’t like him (Maskwell) and suspects him of conspiring with his Aunt, Lady Touchwood.
So, in just the first few minutes of the play, Congreve has established all the characters, their relationships, the baddies’ scheme against him and his counter-plan. It reminds me of the game of strategy, Risk. You feel some kind of process flow diagram is required to capture not only the relationships, but the flows of energy, of ‘hate’ and ‘love’ and the elaborate scheming.
The other menfolk join Mellefont and Careless in the gallery, Sir Paul and Lord Touchwood drunk and reel off to see the women, leaving Brisk and Lord Froth to display their pretentiousness and folly to the two male leads e.g. Lord Froth goes to plays solely not to laugh at them and thus mock the authors. Which Careless says is idiotic, and they then debate what is meant by wit. Then go off to join the ladies
Enter Lady Touchwood and Maskwell, in effect The Conspirators. She is livid with him. He is sly. It becomes clear that, on the rebound from Mellefont’s rejection, hot and indignant, she allowed Maskwell to sleep with her, or:
MASKWELL: I pressed the yielding minute, and was blest.
Thus – as Lady Touchwood sees it – degrading her and betraying his patron, Lord Touchwood, her husband, who has sponsored Maskwell’s rise.
At his words Lady Touchwood quickly flares up into a fury, pacing up and down, and Maskwell keeps having to wait for her to calm down. Maskwell shrewdly sees that what lies at the root of her fury is her ongoing unrequited passion for Mellefont. She loves him and hates him at the same time. Maskwell vows to help her by breaking off Mellefont’s match with Cynthia to which she greedily agrees.
Maskwell tells her he has a Cunning Plan. Lady Touchwood must persuade Lady Pliant that Mellefont is secretly in love with her. Do this, and more of the plan will follow… They exeunt.
Act 2
Lady Froth (dim) and Cynthia (Mellefont’s clever fiancée). Froth is comically pretentious and patronising.
LADY FROTH: For sure my Lord Froth … wants nothing but a blue ribbon and a star to make him shine, the very phosphorus of our hemisphere. Do you understand those two hard words? If you don’t, I’ll explain ’em to you.
CYNTHIA: Yes, yes, madam, I’m not so ignorant. —At least I won’t own it, to be troubled with your instructions. [Aside.]
In this scene Lord and Lady Froth get ample room to display their nauseatingly self-satisfied love for each other, they praise Brisk for his infinite wit, and generally preen and show off to each other. Lady Froth writes, poems and plays, she has even now completed an epic poem titled The Syllabub, a play on words given that her husband’s name is Froth.
These scenes powerfully convey the sense that ‘we’ – the Truly Tasteful – are adrift in a sea of fools.
They push off, leaving the stage to the two young lovers, Mellefont and Cynthia, who proceed to demonstrate that they are intelligent, level headed and, above all, equal in the cut and thrust of witty conversation. They compare marriage to a game of bowls, or a game at cards.
Into this civilised conversation intrude Lord and Lady Plyant, the former hopping mad because he thinks Mellefont is using Cynthia as a pretext (‘a stalking horse’) to seduce his wife, Lady P. Both are outraged and insist on taking Cynthia away from this snake in the grass. Mellefont instantly detects the malign hand of Lady Touchwood.
Leaving Lady Plyant and Mellefont alone. The comedy in this scene comes from the way Lady Plyant starts out outraged and scandalised at what they’ve been told of Mellefont fancying her, but then slowly dwells on the weakness of the flesh, and of course she is attractive, very attractive, and so, well, nature must take its course:
LADY PLYANT: I know love is powerful, and nobody can help his passion. ’Tis not your fault; nor, I swear, it is not mine. How can I help it, if I have charms? And how can you help it, if you are made a captive?
Lady Plyant becomes increasingly confused about her own attitude, then, as other characters approach, flees.
Mellefont soliloquises that this complication – the red herring that Mellefont fancies Lady Plyant – is his aunt’s doing sure enough – yet it is a relatively simple ruse, ‘a trifling design’. Surely there is more behind. A suspicion which echoes Maskwell’s earlier explanation to Lady Touchwood that he has ‘a stronger plot’.
Enter Maskwell. He feigns hearty friendship with Mellefont and proceeds to tell him most of the truth i.e. Lady Touchwood is conspiring against her marriage and has asked him, Maskwell, to be her tool, to conspire to cancel the marriage, in reward for which he, Maskwell, will receive Cynthia.
Mellefont is innocently grateful to ‘his friend’ and asks for details but Maskwell says people are coming. Return in an hour and he will explain everything. Mellefont exits.
Maskwell delivers a soliloquy, much like one of Iago’s soliloquies, explaining his ideology i.e. all’s fair in love and war, and lying and cheating appear the same to the external viewer as truth and honesty.
MASKWELL: Treachery? What treachery? Love cancels all the bonds of friendship, and sets men right upon their first foundations.
Most of the poems and songs in these plays are conventional jingles, but he delivers a quatrain which has genuine psychological power:
Why will mankind be fools, and be deceived,
And why are friends’ and lovers’ oaths believed,
When each, who searches strictly his own mind,
May so much fraud and power of baseness find?
Act 3
Lord and Lady Touchwood during which the Lord finds Lady all too quick to believe bad things of Mellefont and wanting to call the marriage off. He suspects her. She moves to overcome this doubt by going on to say that Mellefont made a pass at her too, only a few days ago, it was probably nothing… and so cunningly infuriating Lord Touchwood till he vows to strip Mellefont naked and throw him out in the street. She pushes him into a side room.
Enter Maskwell and he and Lady Touchwell continue with their conspiracy i.e. they must continue to work on Lord Touchwood and not let his anger to Mellefont cool. Maskwell tells her to tell Lord Touchwood that he (Maskwell) is a good friend to Mellefont, but tried to restrain his passion for Lady T, and vowed he would tell Lord T next time Mellefont told him he was about to make another pass at her. Lady Touchwell agrees, but in an aside Maskwell tells the audience this manoeuvre will also allow Maskwell to cheat Lady Touchwood – the person he’s talking to at that moment. What a bad man!
Lady Touchwood departs to continue playing on Lord Touchwood’s anger at Mellefont. They arrange to meet back up at 8pm that night.
Maskwell has a soliloquy in which he thinks aloud how difficult it is to keep up a pretence of passion for Lady Touchwood who now bores him. He makes the cynically unpleasant point that pretending passion is easy enough in the build-up sex, ‘before fruition’ – but afterwards much harder.
Along comes Mellefont and Maskwell outlines a cunning plan to him. He explains that Lady Touchwood – as payment for Maskwell fouling up the marriage of Mellefont and Cynthia – has offered him, Maskwell, her body. He is to go to her apartment at 8pm to ravish her. Now – how about Mellefont comes along a little after and catches them about to have sex? Maskwell will run out a back passage, leaving Mellefont to confront Lady Touchwood with her attempted adultery. She will have to comply with his wishes, and they will be to cease and desist putting obstacles in the way of his marriage to Cynthia.
Mellefont overflows with gratitude to Maskwell, promises to rendezvous with him at 7.45 tonight, Maskwell exits.
Careless joins Mellefont and tells him how his wooing of Lady Plyant is going i.e. he’s struggling, she goes on and on about her virtue, and they both laugh and what a hen-pecked husband she has made out of Lord Plyant.
At which point Lord and Lady Plyant enter. It becomes clearer than ever that Lady P really henpecks, badgers and humiliates her husband in public. A boy brings a letter. He goes to give it to Sir Paul but Lady P insists she receives it. Just one of the ways in which the normal hierarchy of male authority is undermined in their marriage.
While she opens the letter, Sir Paul laments to Careless that he has a fine estate, town houses and so on, but no heir. Surely that is easy to remedy, says Careless. No, alas, replies Sir Paul, his wife will only let him touch her once a year, if then. In fact they go on to describe the way Sir Paul lets himself be swaddled in blankets like a baby before bed-time to render him utterly incapable of movement, let alone seduction.
Presumably this is meant to be comic, and the audience is meant to fall about at Sir Paul’s pathetic figure, but it comes across on the page as rather sad. The comic patter continues to its logical conclusion, which is Lord Plyant wishing Careless could help him to achieve a male heir. Well, says Careless, I may be able to help you out there…
Enter Lord Froth and Cynthia. Lord Froth is the fool who has a downer on anyone laughing, such a vulgar habit! Cynthia humours the old fool.
Boy enters with another note, Sir Paul tries to interrupt Lady Plyant but she is deep in conversation with Careless, who says aside to Lord Plyant that he is managing the matter they talked of – i.e. Sir Paul thinks Careless is somehow wrangling Lady P into having sex with her husband, whereas we realise Careless is chatting her up to at least give her the impression he wants to have sex with her. Or does he want to have sex with her? And is Sir Paul in fact, genuinely encouraging Careless to do so?
Exit Sir Paul. Enter Brisk and Lady Froth. She, if you remember, fancies herself as a writer, so they enter discussing the merits of scenes in her epic poem, a passage designed to expose their ignorance and lack of taste so the audience can laugh at them. They join with Lord Froth in ridiculing some acquaintances, Lady Whiffler, Mr Sneer and Sir Laurence Loud.
In an aside Cynthia says she has realised there’s no-one so stupid as can’t find even stupider people to mock and condemn. She often makes remarks like this, choric comments on the action.
A chair has arrived in which apparently is conveyed Lady Froth’s daughter. It is indicative of her vain pretensions that she has named her daughter Sapho (after the ancient Greek poet) and very publicly claims she can’t be without seeing her every two hours or so. For some reason, giving children pretentious names reminded me of Posy Simmonds’s cartoon strip, Posy, mocking middle class pretensions. Three hundred years separate the two. Nothing really changes.
Act 4
Mellefont and Cynthia. I find them an attractive couple. Neither is cheating or deceiving the other. They speak as complete equals without recourse to all the insults common in Restoration comedy. They contemplate running off and marrying for love, damn the fact that she’s an heiress (aha). Then she says no, but to prove his devotion, she is counting on Mellefont bringing Lady Touchwood to heel.
They exit and give way to Careless and Lady Plyant. If you remember, Mellefont asked his friend Careless to seduce Lady Plyant so as to prevent her listening to and becoming part of Lady Touchwood’s campaign to derail Mellefont’s marriage. This scene is designed to show Lady Plyant’s wordy self-regard, which is quite funny, but the real comedy lies in Careless adopting and exaggerating the rhetoric of a devoted lover, interspersed with exasperated asides to the audience complaining about how difficult it is to keep up this charade.
Finally, after reams of loverly doggerel, Lady Plyant breaks and weeps at his loverly devotion – at which point Careless tells the audience he’s struggling not to burst out laughing. At which point Sir Paul appears with his daughter, Cynthia. Careless quickly hands Lady Plyant a love letter and scarpers.
Now, you may remember that Lady Plyant had caused a great fuss when she accused Mellefont of making a pass at her. Now she changes her tune. Now she declares it was an honest mistake on her part, she believes Mellefont is honourable, and when her husband pushes her on the subject, says she believes so because Mr Careless has told her so. Smart Cynthia immediately see her (step)-mother is in love with Careless, and has changed to her (Cynthia’s) side i.e. supporting the marriage of Cynthia and Mellefont – because Careless has asked her to.
Now Lady Plyant asks for that letter which Sir Paul received in the last act. She wants to read Careless’s love letter under pretence of reading Sir Paul’s. As you might expect it is full of lovey expressions but when she goes to return Sir Paul’s letter to him, she gives him Careless’s love letter by mistake!
Brisk arrives to say there’s music and dancing in the hall and can they please release Cynthia to go dance and also, could Sir Paul send Careless to the dancing if he meets him. Sir Paul promises and exits.
Brisk, by himself, soliloquises, telling us he is love with Lady Froth and fussing and fretting about what to say to her.
Enter Lady Froth for a ridiculous comic scene in which they both declare their love yet mock each other, incapable of taking themselves or the situation seriously. They embrace and at that precise moment her husband, Lord Froth, enters.
Scene VII Thinking quickly, Lady Froth converts the embrace into practicing the country dancing which even now is taking place in the main hall. Lord Froth is momentarily jealous then realises they are dancing and relaxes. A bit. Still suspicious.
The scene contains a particularly crude piece of double entendre. Embroidering on her excuse, Lady Froth asks her husband if he will practice dancing with her.
LADY FROTH: Shall you and I do our close dance, to show Mr. Brisk?
LORD FROTH: No, my dear, do it with him.
LADY FROTH: I’ll do it with him, my lord, when you are out of the way.
You can well imagine the arch way an actress can deliver that line to the audience which roars with laughter, 330 years ago, as today. They all exit.
Scene VIII Enter Lady Plyant and Careless. Now we see the denouement of the mistaken letter gag. Lady P just has time to tell Careless she’s given her husband Careless’s love letter before…
Scene IX he enters, reading the letter which makes it perfectly plain Careless is scheduled to rendezvous with his wife that night and plough her. He is incensed and very bitter that he has spent three years being swaddled up every night, while his wife is all the time arranging for him to become a cuckold.
Scene X However, Careless has had time to come up with a cunning plan and Lady Plyant now enters, asks her husband if he has read this outrageous letter, and turns the tables by asking whether he – Sir Paul – was complicit in this scheme to debauch her? Eh? Eh? And Sir Paul is so hen-pecked that she brilliantly succeeds in persuading him that she is the wronged party, insists she will ask for a divorce. Because of course, Sir Paul did ask Careless to melt his wife, so he feels somehow responsible.
There’s a little exchange which makes it clear that, as punishment, not only will Sir Paul be utterly swaddled again tonight, as usual, but his right hand which is usually kept free so he can… will also be bound in cloths. So he can what? Pee, presumably, Surely. Lady Plyant storms impressively out.
Scene XI Enter Careless. The audience now sees Careless spinning elaborate excuses. He says he tried to talk Lady Plyant into being more amenable to her husband, then pretended to be in love with her and her, then went to the lengths of writing her a love letter. He promises to report back if it has any effect, but laments that she is a tower of chastity! This is an impressive story and Sir Paul falls for it, rejoicing in his wife’s virtue.
Scene XII Mellefont and Maskwell. It’s 7.45pm. Maskwell tells Mellefont to sneak into Lady Touchwood’s chambers so as to be ready to leap out apparently catching her in the act of being unfaithful with Maskwell, thus putting himself in a position to make her stop trying to undermine Mellefont’s marriage. Got it?
Scene XIII Maskwell soliloquises, explaining that he has an ‘after game’ to manipulate the situation further.
Scene XIV Enter Lord Touchwood. Maskwell plays him, playing up to what Lady Touchwood told her husband, namely that Maskwell knew about Mellefont’s wish to ravish Lady Touchwood, but tried to stop him. Maskwell plays the loyal friend who doesn’t want to betray his best friend, but… says he had hoped it was a one-off indiscretion, but now finds Mellefont resolved in his villainy. Prove it! says Lord Touchwood. And now we see why Maskwell has arranged for Mellefont to be in Lady Touchwood’s chambers. Maskwell tells him to meet him 15 minutes hence outside Lady Touchwood’s chamber and he will give the lord the proof he requires. Touchwood agrees and they part.
Scene XV Mellefont hiding, wishes Lord Touchwood were her to see his wife debauched by Maskwell.
Scene XVI Enter Lady Touchwood saying Maskwell is late. She is expecting simply to have sex with him.
Scene XVII Enter Maskwell apologising for being late. They start to kiss, at which moment Mellefont leaps out from behind an arras, Lady Touchwood screams, Maskwell runs out the back door.
Scene XVIII It takes Lady Touchwood a while to calm down during which she and Mellefont converse in a relatively high-flown tragic register, he recommending her to Christian penitence, she talking about hell and damnation. All a bit damned serious, what. Finally they reach the stage Mellefont wants, which is for Lady Touchwood to repent and say she will put no more barriers in the way of Mellefont’s marriage to Cynthia.
Scene XIX Maskwell softly lets Lord Touchwood in through the door.
Scene XX Lady Touchwood sees Lord Touchwood in hiding. Suddenly she realises she can switch the situation to her own advantage. Suddenly she starts struggling with Mellefont and begging him not to ravish her. He thinks she’s gone mad until Lord Touchwood leaps out of hiding and runs towards him with his sword raised.
Lady Touchwood virtuously holds her husband back, claiming Mellefont knows not what he does. Mellefont realises he has destroyed his own case, and becomes almost delirious. [This all feels a lot more like a tragedy than a comedy.] When Touchwood’s back is turned Lady T grins at Mellefont and makes the horn symbol behind her own husband’s back. God, she has totally totally triumphed and Mellefont is driven to paroxysms of frustration as they exeunt.
Scene XXI Mellefont soliloquises with an intensity which recalls Hamlet.
Oh, I could curse my stars, fate, and chance; all causes and accidents of fortune in this life!
Even at this nadir of his fortunes he believes Maskwell is his friend and they had a good plan and it’s just bad luck that it went wrong.
Act 5
Scene I Lady Touchwood is blessing her good fortune that her husband happened to enter the chamber at that moment, Maskwell enthusiastically agreeing, although we know it was his doing.
Scene II Lord Touchwood approaching, Lady T exits. Maskwell has a brief soliloquy saying he will manage Touchwood.
Scene III Seeing Touchwood in earshot Maskwell delivers a fake-honest monologue in which he berates himself for being false to his friend in order to be virtuous and help Lord Touchwood. In case I haven’t emphasises this, remember that Maskwell owes his place in the world, i.e. position and money, to Touchwood’s support.
It works perfectly. Persuaded of his saintly virtue, Touchwood comes forward and declares that he will blast Mellefont from the family, and put Maskwell in his place. Maskwell feigns being overcome and then says there is one last thing to make his happiness complete… Cynthia’s hand in marriage? says Touchwood. He will arrange it with Sir Paul. He exits.
Scene IV Maskwell alone realises a) his scheme has totally succeeded but b) if either Mellefont or Lady Touchwood hear about his betrothal to Cynthia they will both immediately realise he’s been gulling them and will unite against him. He must be cunning. He must mix a lot of truth with his lies. The best deceits are the almost true ones.
No mask like open truth to cover lies,
As to go naked is the best disguise.
Scene V Enter Mellefont and Maskwell makes haste to tell him the complete truth, that Lord Touchwood has appointed Maskwell his heir and affianced him to Cynthia, but claims he wants none of it, and says he has a cunning plan. They go off to find Cynthia.
Scene VI Cut to the scene in which Lord Touchwood tells Lady Touchwood his plan i.e. to make Maskwell his heir and marry him to Cynthia. Lady Touchwood is appalled, specially when Lord T tells her Maskwell himself told him how in love with Cynthia he is. Lady T is furious. The rat!
Scene VII Lady Touchwood alone soliloquises. O villain! This isn’t at all funny, it has real tragic force:
What, have I been bawd to his designs, his property only, a baiting place? Now I see what made him false to Mellefont. Shame and distraction! I cannot bear it, oh! what woman can bear to be a property? To be kindled to a flame, only to light him to another’s arms; oh! that I were fire indeed that I might burn the vile traitor.
Scene VIII Enter Sir Paul. Lady Touchwood with Lady MacBeth hauteur calls him a fool and a cuckold which feeble Sir Paul takes to be a joke. He wants to find his wife to discuss the revolution in events i.e. Touchwood disinheriting Mellefont and replacing him with Maskwell. Lady T tells him that if he allows for the cancellation of the marriage and raising of Maskwell, she will tear his eyes out! He thinks she’s mad and goes off to find his wife to discuss the fate of their daughter (Cynthia).
Scene IX Maskwell reveals his cunning plan to Cynthia and Mellefont which is to arrange to borrow Lord Touchwood’s coach and six and elope with Cynthia, and the family chaplain to marry them. Or at least tell Touchwood that’s the only way he can gain Cynthia. He assures Mellefont he’s not actually going to do it – though of course he is.
Maskwell tells Mellefont that he, Mellefont, will dress up as the chaplain so the whole thing will be under his control. Both he and Cynthia are bamboozled by the complexity of the double bluff of the plan (as was I) but Mellefont agrees to meet in my lady’s dressing chamber. Mellefont exits.
Scene X Maskwell tells Cynthia he’s had second thoughts, He’ll meet her in the chaplain’s chamber on the corner of the gallery. She agrees but says you must tell Mellefont. Of course I will, says Maskwell, lying. She exits.
Scene XI Maskwell soliloquises the deep down the deceived want to be deceived. He told them exactly what the plan is yet neither of them smelt a rat. Now to recruit the chaplain or, as they seem to have been called in the aristocratic cant of the day, the ‘Levite’, in this case a Mr Saygrace.
Scene XII He knocks on the door of Mr Saygrace who opens it. There is some comedy about the chaplain’s garrulity but Maskwell now explains the plot. He has paid Saygrace to provide a clerical suit but sewn up the sleeves. They’ll now send the suit to Mellefont’s rooms. While he struggles to get into it Cynthia will arrive back, the room will be kept dark and Cynthia will be persuaded that Saygrace is really Mellefont. And so will accompany Maskwell down to the carriage and so be carried away and married against her will.
Saygrace is a small but perfectly formed example of the claim that Congreve gives every one of his characters distinctive speech patterns, e.g:
MASKWELL: Have you stitched the gown sleeve, that Mellefont may be puzzled, and waste time in putting it on?
SAYGRACE: I have: the gown will not be indued without perplexity.
Scene XIII Maskwell is with Lord Touchwood who tells him something has triggered Lady Touchwood and she has gone mad with rage, something about him, Maskwell. Damn, Maskwell had feared just this possibility – she’s realised how he has used her. Lord Touchwood is irked that his wife is disobeying him and wishes Maskwell’s marriage could be signed and sealed this evening. This falls perfectly into Maskwell’s wishes and he tells Lord Touchwood he has a cunning plan…
Scene XIV Enter Careless and Cynthia. Careless has seen and overheard just enough to realise Maskwell is concocting some wicked plan.
Scene XV Enter Mellefont, joining Careless and Cynthia. Careless tells him Maskwell is a villain and intends to betray him. Mellefont refuses to believe it. They all see Saygrace leaving his room with a bundle under his arm and the two men follow him.
Scene XVI Leaving Cynthia to encounter Lord Touchwood. Touchwood is musing to himself, surprised that Maskwell had such an intricate plan already worked out, and had arranged it with the chaplain. When she overhears the word chaplain, Cynthia really realises something is wrong. She begins to tell Lord Touchwood that here is betrayal but at that moment they hear the voices of Maskwell and Lady Touchwood from a nearby room.
Scene XVII Touchwood and Cynthia hide and witness the following scene: Lady Touchwood is so outraged by Maskwell’s betrayal she is holding a dagger and prepares to strike. But his impassive confident smile disarms her, she drops it and starts weeping, saying she never could resist him. Lord Touchwood is stupefied.
Lady Touchwood tells him why she was so angry – because she heard he was to marry Cynthia. Maskwell asks her how could he, who had enjoyed bliss in her arms, possibly choose any other woman? Listening to this Lord Touchwood splutters and chokes with anger.
Maskwell now tells Lady Touchwood that the entire plan has been to please her and prove faithful to her. How so? Well, explains Maskwell, he has told Mellefont to meet them in my lady’s dressing chamber. Well, Lady Touchwood should be there disguised as Cynthia, and accompany him down the stairs. When he realises it is her not Cynthia, he will be in her power and she can force him to love her. And if he won’t, she can stab him in the heart – and Maskwell gives her the dagger! He tells her to run and change. She is amazed at the cunning of his villainy and runs off.
Scene XVIII Maskwell soliloquises, overheard by Cynthia and Touchwood. He congratulates himself on his quick thinking and hopes out loud that Cynthia is ready at the meeting place. (She’s not; she’s still hidden onstage overhearing everything along with Lord Touchwood.) And exits.
Scene XIX Cynthia and Touchwood emerge from their hiding place. Touchwood is beside himself with rage and mortification. His wife the adulterer and Maskwell the villain! He vows to forgive Mellefont and to humiliate the baddies. Let’s round up the entire cast, he says, and bring them back here. Exeunt.
Scene XX A funny scene in which dim Sir Paul explains everything is topsy-turvy to Lord Froth who’s been having a nap. What’s topsy-turvy asks Froth, my wife? No no, says Sir Paul, she’s in the garden with Brisk. Doing what? Laying their heads together? What? Writing poetry, my lord, making couplets. WHAT? So it’s a little bit of comic relief between the tragic outbursts and the final scene.
Scene XXI Enter Lady Froth and Brisk, greeting her husband and unwittingly continuing the rude double entendres when she says she has been lying on her back in the garden studying the stars. Has she now?
Scene XXII Enter Lady Plyant, Cynthia and Careless i.e. almost the entire cast is assembled. Careless is explaining to Lady Plyant about the conspiracy they have discovered, she says Oh my Lord are all men so fickle and Careless gallantly replies, ‘Madam, you have charms to fix inconstancy’, to which she blushes.
Scene XXIII At that moment there is a loud shriek and Lady Touchwood comes running onstage pursued by her husband dressed as a curate. They struggle, she breaks free and runs away.
LORD TOUCHWOOD: Go, and thy own infamy pursue thee.
Scene XXIV Enter Mellefont dragging Maskwell. He accuses him to his face, contemns him, but Maskwell (like Iago) says nothing. Touchwood orders his servants to seize him. This is all very tragic and Shakespearian. Congreve brings off a nice little bit of comic repartee right at the end of the play, for the assembled fops and fools are of course astonished by what they’re witnessing.
BRISK: This is all very surprising, let me perish.
LADY FROTH: You know I told you Saturn looked a little more angry than usual.
That made me laugh out loud. But the whole thing suddenly ends. Lord Touchwood says, Mellefont I forgive you, and tells everyone to be merry.
LORD TOUCHWOOD: We’ll think of punishment at leisure, but let me hasten to do justice in rewarding virtue and wronged innocence. Nephew, I hope I have your pardon, and Cynthia’s.
MELLEFONT: We are your lordship’s creatures.
LORD TOUCHWOOD: And be each other’s comfort. Let me join your hands. Unwearied nights, and wishing days attend you both; mutual love, lasting health, and circling joys, tread round each happy year of your long lives.
Well, yes, but mainly No, no they can’t because the tone has become intense and serious and a few cheerful words cannot undo the generally dark tendency of the previous few hours.
Aspects of The Double Dealer
The Plot
I can see why the play was not a success, but it’s not, I think, from the ‘experimental’ unity-of-place aspects. Instead it’s the plot. It feels like everything has been sacrificed to the fiendishly complex set of interlocking schemes, which continually escalate in invention and complexity until, as Lord Touchwood says:
I am confounded when I look back, and want a clue to guide me through the various mazes of unheard-of treachery.
It feels like so much energy went into mapping out these plots and stratagems that none was left over for the comedy. Comedy comes in numerous forms, but 1. the play has no dominating comic figure such as the great Widow Blackacre in William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer or the awesome Lord Foppington in John Vanbrugh’s play The Relapse. And 2. there are surprisingly few comic situations. Instead the core situations are often quite serious, and the comically dim characters – weak-willed Sir Paul Plyant and his bossy wife, and the absurdly pretentious Lady Froth and her giggling husband Lord Froth, plus the idiot fop Brisk – are simply wheeled on at regular intervals to plaster over the more serious foundations.
In other words, the comedy doesn’t very often arise from the plot or situations, but feels bolted on, almost as an afterthought.
Tragedy not comedy
The other really obvious element which undermines its enjoyment as a comedy is that quite a lot of it deals with genuine, extreme and tragic emotions, which are expressed in extreme tragic rhetoric. When Lady Touchwood goes to stab Maskless she is in real emotional agony:
LADY TOUCH: Ha! Do you mock my rage? Then this shall punish your fond, rash contempt. [Goes to strike.]
When Lord Touchwood realises a) how Maskwell has played him but even worse b) how his wife has been unfaithful to him with one man and is planning to do it again with another, he is in real torment.
LORD TOUCHWOOD: Astonishment binds up my rage! Villainy upon villainy! Heavens, what a long track of dark deceit has this discovered! I am confounded when I look back, and want a clue to guide me through the various mazes of unheard-of treachery. My wife! Damnation! My hell!
Maskwell has more in common with a tragic villain such as Iago than a comic character like Lord Foppington, and he sets the tone which, despite various comic interludes, ends up feeling really quite dark and intense.
Tragic register
Extreme words and expressions predominate.
Hell Almost from the start Hell is invoked, Mellefont describes the hell in Lady Touchwood’s imagination (‘hell is not more busy than her brain, nor contains more devils than that imagination); it is a frequent ejaculation (‘Hell and damnation!’, ‘Confusion and hell!’, ‘Hell and the devil!’, ‘Hell and amazement!’
Villain I associate the word ‘villain’ with Hamlet:
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables,–meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
The word villain occurs 11 times in all of Hamlet, but 26 times in The Double Dealer.
Devil 16 times.
But it’s the way this tragic vocabulary is combined into firebreathingly earnest speeches:
LADY TOUCHWOOD: Death, do you dally with my passion? Insolent devil! But have a care,—provoke me not; for, by the eternal fire, you shall not ’scape my vengeance. Calm villain! How unconcerned he stands, confessing treachery and ingratitude! Is there a vice more black? Oh, I have excuses thousands for my faults; fire in my temper, passions in my soul, apt to ev’ry provocation, oppressed at once with love, and with despair. But a sedate, a thinking villain, whose black blood runs temperately bad, what excuse can clear?
Violence
Right at the start Mellefont tells Careless that, provoked, Lady Touchwood made a run for his sword to do him or herself an injury. Later Lady Touchwood threatens to stab Maskwell. Maskwell gives her back the dagger so she can stab Mellefont. Lord Touchwood has to be restrained from drawing his sword and stabbing Mellefont when he thinks the latter has deflowered his wife, threatening to write the word ‘villain’ in his face with the tip of his sword!
Divorces not marriages
Comedies generally end in marriages, and this one sort of does, but the over-riding impression is of the catastrophic collapse of Lord Touchwood’s marriage, which dominates everything else, and finds echoes in Brisk’s adultery with Lady Froth and Lady Plyant’s verging on the edge of adultery with Careless.
Normally in these plays, one marriage at most is adulterated and its failure is outnumbered by two or so happy new marriages at the end. In this play the almost certain adultery of three marriages just outweighs the supposedly happy marriage which concludes it.
Incest
In fact, now I come to review the play, the theme of incest is almost more prevalent than marriage.
1. Mellefont is Lord Touchwood’s nephew. That means that, when Touchwood is led to believe Mellefont has been sleeping with Lady Touchwood it meant he was having sex with his own aunt – which was, in those times, considered incest – a crime she makes the most of when she play acts that Mellefont is ravishing her for the benefit of Lord Touchwood who has just entered the room:
LADY TOUCHWOOD: I’ll grow to the ground, be buried quick beneath it, e’er I’ll be consenting to so damned a sin as incest! unnatural incest!
2. Cynthia is Sir Paul Plyant’s daughter. Her mother died and Sir Paul remarried, so the current Lady Plyant is Cynthia’s step-mother. In other words, early in the play when Lady Plyant is led to believe that Mellefont wants to sleep with her, she stretches a point to claim that sleeping with your fiancée’s step-mother is incest:
LADY PLYANT: Oh, the impiety of it… and the unparalleled wickedness! O merciful Father! How could you think to reverse nature so, to make the daughter the means of procuring the mother?
MELLEFONT: The daughter to procure the mother!
LADY PLYANT: Ay, for though I am not Cynthia’s own mother, I am her father’s wife, and that’s near enough to make it incest.
Sir Paul Plyant and Lady Touchwood are brother and sister, tying the family relationships even tighter together. This sense of the characters forming a close-knit circle is a kind of geneological counterpart to the unity of place. It is a kind of unity of family which helps to make the play feel claustrophobic, as if it is all taking place within one family. It isn’t, but sometimes it feels as if it is.
Hamlet
Lord Touchwood is Mellefont’s Uncle. The accusation of incest keeps recurring. The keyword ‘villain’ is repeated. That, along with the frequent drawing of swords, reminds me more than ever of Hamlet. As does the unity of place – the claustrophobic castle at Elsinor and the claustrophobic gallery of Lord Touchwood’s house. And as does the frequent hiding in order to hear characters make key confessions – as Polonius hides behind an arras or Hamlet comes across Claudius praying, and as Touchwood sees the scene where Lady Touchwood pretends to be ravished, or Cynthia and Touchwood hide and finally discover the truth about Lady T and Maskwell.
Not the plot – the mood are sometimes cognate.
A family alliance
In fact in his introduction to the Penguin edition, Eric Rump points out that the marriage of Mellefont and Cynthia will not only unite two families but save them. It is made plain that Sir Paul Plyant has no male heir, only a daughter (Cynthia) and the way his second wife treats him, is unlikely to have any more children, while it is equally clear that Lord Touchwood, though blessed with properties, has no heir at all which is why he has adopted his nephew Mellefont as heir.
In other words, without the marriage, both families will go extinct. So there’s more than just money and a pretty woman riding on the marriage. There is the survival of two lineages, which explains Lord Touchwood’s outburst when Cynthia casually says she has vowed never to marry if she can’t marry Mellefont:
SIR PAUL: Never to marry! Heavens forbid! must I neither have sons nor grandsons? Must the family of the Plyants be utterly extinct for want of issue male? O impiety!
In which case:
All were ruined, all my hopes lost. My heart would break, and my estate would be left to the wide world.
A plight which will, presumably, have carried more weight and been more readily understandable to its original audience 330 years ago.
Soliloquies
And that brings me to another of the ways the play was experimental which is the large number of soliloquies it contains. In other Restoration comedies plenty of characters give little asides directly to the audience, but this is different. An ‘aside’ is almost always comic, whereas a soliloquy or dramatic monologue is almost always serious and, in this play, often very serious, Machiavellian and wicked.
The widespread use of soliloquy is another way in which the play feels like it’s using the language, the tone and techniques more associated with tragedy than comedy.
In fact the extensive use of soliloquy was singled out by commentators on the play for criticism, and Congreve goes to some lengths to defend it in the dedicatory epistle. He argues that a man alone talking to himself is generally a bad sign in life, but that a man thinking – weighing the pros and cons of an action – cannot be conveyed any other way onstage except through the medium of words. The audience cannot sit and watch a man doing nothing but think silently for 3 or 4 minutes. Therefore soliloquy must be allowed, or as Congreve drolly puts it, the playwright is ‘forced to make use of the expedient of speech, no other better way being yet invented for the communication of thought’.
And he makes the additional point about soliloquy that it tends to depict a character who’s contemplating criminal or anti-social activity. If a character is in love or anxious or afraid, they can easily share these feelings with a confidant – and hence most of the lead characters in Restoration comedy come accompanied by a confidant and a lot of the text consists of lead and confidant sharing thoughts, analysing the situation and so on.
But if a character is contemplating a crime, or a scheme whereby he or she plans to deceive some or all of the other characters, then by its very nature the character has to keep their thoughts to themselves.
Thus the surprising ubiquity of soliloquy in The Double Dealer is not a wilful experiment, it reflects the fact that two of the central characters – Maskwell and Lady Touchwood – spend a great deal of time devising schemes and then evaluating their schemes. It reflects the high proportion of ‘villainy’ in the text.
And pondering all this has made me understand better why soliloquy is more often found in tragedy – where wicked characters such as Iago or Macbeth are scheming – than in comedy – where the mere fact that you have characters joking about themselves or others requires dialogue.
So the mere existence of soliloquies in a play is a good indication of its fundamentally tragic nature. And the number of soliloquies in this play indicate that beneath all the (often very funny) comic scenes, lurks a fundamentally serious plot structure.
The happy couple
A final peculiarity is that the (often deeply buried) motor of the plot is the planned marriage of Mellefont and Cynthia which Maskwell’s malignancy is devoted to spiking. And yet the happy couple are very rarely on stage alone together, only two or three times and each one relatively brief.
In other words, the central relationship the whole narrative is meant to be about, is only very thinly sketched in. Eric Rump describes it as having a certain ‘autumnal feeling’ about it. And this is another reason why it pales into insignificance compared to the twin infidelities of Lady Touchwood and her towering tragic rages, which carry vastly more dramatic weight.
I can see why it ‘failed’. It’s a tragedy masquerading as a comedy. There are quite a few really funny scenes and moments in it – Brisk and Lady Froth converting a passionate embrace into a dancing lesson springs to mind, Careless brilliantly explaining away the love letter to his wife which was enraging Sir Paul, and Brisk’s nonchalant comment right at the end – but there are also howling rages, threats of murder and violence, references to incest, and it ends with a woman running howling offstage, an honourable marriage in ruins, and a Machiavellian villain dragged off virtually in chains.
And I can see why Congreve was cross that it failed and defends himself at more than usual length in the dedicatory epistle to the printed version. He had put a lot of effort into it. He was trying to do something new. He was hurt that carping critics attacked almost every aspect of his play.
Anyway, once bitten… In his third play he returned to a purity of comic tone and to the trusted comic techniques, which helped make it one of his best.
Metaphors
Having noticed Congreve’s stylish use of metaphors in The Old Bachelor, I was alert for them in this play, such as Careless’s casual military metaphor:
CARELESS: So you have manned your works; but I wish you may not have the weakest guard where the enemy is strongest.
Describing Maskwell’s faithlessness uses metaphors of gardening:
CARELESS: His affection to you, you have confessed, is grounded upon his interest, that you have transplanted; and should it take root in my lady, I don’t see what you can expect from the fruit.
This ability to choose an appropriate metaphor and then to extend it gracefully, is a sign of wit, and a sign of fools is that their analogies or metaphors are graceless or inappropriate. Here is Lady Plyant mixing her metaphors with laughable effect (and being complimented on it by her doting husband):
LADY PLYANT: Have I behaved myself with all the decorum and nicety befitting the person of Sir Paul’s wife? Have I preserved my honour as it were in a snow-house for these three years past? Have I been white and unsullied even by Sir Paul himself?
SIR PAUL: Nay, she has been an invincible wife, even to me; that’s the truth on’t.
LADY PLYANT: Have I, I say, preserved myself like a fair sheet of paper for you to make a blot upon?
SIR PAUL: And she shall make a simile with any woman in England.
Whereas cognoscenti like Mellefont and Maskwell are masters of the extended metaphor:
MELLEFONT: Maskwell, welcome, thy presence is a view of land, appearing to my shipwrecked hopes. The witch has raised the storm, and her ministers have done their work: you see the vessels are parted.
MASKWELL: I know it. I met Sir Paul towing away Cynthia. Come, trouble not your head; I’ll join you together ere to-morrow morning, or drown between you in the attempt.
MELLEFONT: There’s comfort in a hand stretched out to one that’s sinking
Useful phrases
When Lady Touchwood picks up a suggestion of Maskwell’s and adds an improvement, Maskwell says admiringly:
Excellent! Your ladyship has a most improving fancy.
‘You have a most improving fancy.’ I’d love to say that to someone in real life.
Old literary criticism is often valuable because it sees works of literature in the round, as a whole. Its judgements are often mature, made by people who have seen a lot of life and often had other full-time careers, as lawyers, politician and so on. So their opinions are aware of and take into account a range of audiences and their essays are written in a language designed to be accessible to all literate readers.
All this contrasts with the highly professionalised nature of contemporary literary criticism, generally written by people who have little or no experience of life beyond the academy; written in fierce competition with other academics and so often focusing on narrow and highly specific aspects of works or genres where the author desires to carve out a niche; and written in a jargon which has become steadily more arcane and removed from everyday English over the past forty years or so.
This kind of modern literary criticism is contained in expensive books destined to be bought only by university libraries, or in remote articles in any one of hundreds of subscription-only specialist journals. It is not, in other words, designed for the average reader. Nowadays, literary criticism is an elite discourse.
Older criticism can also be humane and funny, and can afford to be scathingly critical of its authors, in a way modern po-faced and ‘professional’ criticism often daren’t.
The 1893 edition of The Plays of William Wycherley which Project Gutenberg chose for their online library includes an introduction to Wycherley’s plays by the edition’s editor, W.C. Ward, followed by an extended biographical essay by Thomas Babington Macauley which dates from even earlier, from the 1850s.
(If this appears very old fashioned a) it is, and b) several of the Wikipedia articles about Wycherley appear to be cut and pastes of the relevant articles from the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.)
Introduction by WC Ward
Comedies of Manners Ward describes the Restoration comedies as Comedies of Manners, contrasting them with Shakespeare’s plays which he calls Comedies of Life.
Aristocratic audiences Restoration comedies only illustrate one aspect of life, and that the most superficial – the courtly badinage of aristocrats having affairs. They were initially designed for a tiny, upper-class clientele, and kept that sense of targeting a select audience which ‘gets’ its attitude and in-jokes.
Displays of wit The plays were designed to display Wit and Ingenuity – all other human activities, all other human emotions and psychology, are simply omitted in pursuit of these goals. Their dialogue is not intended to reveal the characters’ psychology or development. It exists solely to display the author’s Wit and to further the ‘Plot’, which also exists solely to demonstrate the author’s ingenuity.
Robot characters The characters are not people, they are ‘simulacra… puppet semblances of humanity’. They only copy human behaviour insofar as is required to further the clockwork plots.
This narrow mechanical aspect of the characterisation is, in Ward’s view, paradoxically a redeeming factor when we come to consider the plays’ indecency and immorality.
Licentiousness always superficial The very fact that the characters are barely human, are really flashy automata, means that their licentiousness and cynicism has no real depth. It doesn’t affect us in the way the same speeches put into the mouths of real characters would affect us, because we know they are the baseless vapourings of toys.
Designed to amuse Ward also defends the plays against the frequent charge of licentiousness by pointing out that they are designed solely to amuse and make us laugh – they don’t even have the deeper ambition of Ben Jonson’s comedies, ‘to laugh us out of vice’.
Antidote to lust And, Ward says, the kind of superficial laughter they prompt on every page is in fact an antidote to lustful thoughts. The plays do not inflame the audience with genuinely licentious and immoral thoughts because the characters are so one-dimensional and the plots are so extravagantly ludicrous that real sexual thoughts never enter our heads.
Virtue triumphs Other critics charge that Restoration comedies only being Virtue on stage to be mocked and ridiculed, which is a bad thing. Ward admits that most of the characters lose no opportunity to mock honesty, hard work, sobriety, the law, business, chasteness and loyalty and fidelity and love. All true. But at the same time, love does eventually triumph (after a superficial fashion) the qualities of loyalty and virtue do, in the end, triumph.
Women of virtue And each play contains at least one female character, and sometimes a man, who is significantly less cynical than the other characters and becomes almost a defender of virtue. For example, Alithea in The Country Wife and Fidelia in The Plain Dealer are unironic emblems of Goodness and Virtue – and they and their values do, eventually, win the day.
Marriage mocked Other critics lament the way the sanctity of Marriage is routinely mocked, at length, continuously, throughout all the plays. Ward puts the defence that when you look closely, the specific examples of marriage being mocked are the marriages of ludicrous characters such as Pinchwife or Vernish. (This defence, in my opinion, is nowhere near adequate; all the characters mock marriage as a school for adulterers and cuckolds far more powerfully and continuously than Ward acknowledges.)
Wycherley’s poetry Ward goes on from Wycherley’s plays to discuss Wycherley’s poetry, which was published in two volumes late in his life and about which he is entertainingly rude. The poems are, in Ward’s opinion (and everyone else’s – he quotes Wycherley’s contemporaries) utterly worthless, beneath criticism. ‘Wycherley had no spark of poetry in his whole composition’.
It’s good to have this confirmed, as I thought the short poems which appear scattered through Wycherley’s plays were utterly lifeless.
Wycherley’s character As to his character:
It is not to be doubted that Wycherley participated in the fashionable follies and vices of the age in which he lived. His early intrigue with the Duchess of Cleveland was notorious.
The success of his plays drew him into aristocratic court circles which really did value the behaviour he describes.
Alexander Pope Late in life, Wycherley became a kind of mentor to the very young Alexander Pope, when the later was only 16 or 17 years old, and their correspondence, and also memoirs written about the great John Dryden, show that Wycherley was loved as a good friend by many of his contemporaries.
Essay by Thomas Babington Macauley
According to Joseph E. Riehl’s book about Charles Lamb and his critics, Macauley wrote his criticism of the Restoration dramatists at least in part as an attack or counter to Charles Lamb’s strong defence of them. Macauley argued that Restoration comedy is degrading to human relationships, and that it promoted ‘evil, perverted or shameful conduct’. I sympathise.
In the 22-page essay on the Gutenberg website, Macauley describes Wycherley’s life and character in some detail, with comments on the plays. Key points are:
Early life Wycherley was born in 1640. Young Wycherley was sent to France as a teenager, where he converted to Catholicism. After the Restoration of 1660, he went to Oxford, left without a degree, studied law at the Inns of Court just long enough to be able to make comic butts of lawyers and their hangers-on, as in The Plain Dealer.
Religious conversion Shrewdly, Wycherley converted back from Catholicism to Anglicanism. Macauley has a droll sense of humour and a nice turn of phrase:
The somewhat equivocal glory of turning, for a short time, a good-for-nothing Papist into a very good-for-nothing Protestant is ascribed to Bishop Barlow.
The Restoration court He gives a vivid sense of the promiscuity of Charles’s court:
The Duchess of Cleveland cast her eyes upon [Wycherley] and was pleased with his appearance. This abandoned woman, not content with her complaisant husband and her royal keeper, lavished her fondness on a crowd of paramours of all ranks, from dukes to rope-dancers.
The Dutch Wars He comments scornfully on the Dutch Wars:
The second Dutch war, the most disgraceful war in the whole history of England, was now raging. It was not in that age considered as by any means necessary that a naval officer should receive a professional education. Young men of rank, who were hardly able to keep their feet in a breeze, served on board the King’s ships, sometimes with commissions and sometimes as volunteers.
The Royal Navy There’s debate about whether Wycherley – like many other completely unqualified ‘gentleman’ – volunteered for the navy, but it would be nice to think so and that it gave verisimilitude to his depiction of Captain Manly and the sailors in The Plain Dealer.
The Country Wife he describes as:
one of the most profligate and heartless of human compositions… the elaborate production of a mind, not indeed rich, original or imaginative, but ingenious, observant, quick to seize hints, and patient of the toil of polishing.
Marriage and prison Wycherley was such a royal favourite that Charles appointed him tutor to his illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond. However, Wycherley ruined his reputation with the king and swiftly lost the post of tutor by unwisely marrying the Countess of Drogheda, ‘a gay young widow’ in 1679. She was jealous and kept a close eye on him till she died young in 1685. He hoped he would leave her a fortune, but she left him a long and ruinous legal case. Possibly as a result of this, Wycherley was thrown into the Fleet prison where he languished for seven long years. The story goes that the newly crowned King James II (ascended the throne 1685) happened to see a performance of The Plain Dealer, asked about the author, was shocked to discover he was in gaol, paid his debts and settled an annuity on him.
Released, he was nonetheless impoverished, unable to sustain his old lifestyle, and unable to write another play. In 1704, after 27 years of silence, a volume of poetry appeared – ‘a bulky volume of obscene doggerel’.
Alexander Pope It was in the same year he formed the friendship with the young sickly hunchback Alexander Pope, who he mentored, took about town, and who in turn offered to rewrite and ‘improve’ the older man’s verse. Quite quickly Pope realised how dire Wycherley’s poetry was and that nothing could save it. Quite a few of their letters survive which shed light on both men.
Literary reputation Rests entirely on his last two plays, The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer. His characters are often little more than mouthpieces for the contrived wit of the time.
It was alleged he was a slow and painstaking author, but Pope claims he wrote The Plain Dealer in three weeks! Having just read both his hit plays, I am inclined to believe the slow and painstaking version. They both feel slow and laboured.
In truth, his mind, unless we are greatly mistaken, was naturally a very meagre soil, and was forced only by great labour and outlay to bear fruit which, after all, was not of the highest flavour.
Widow Blackacre Macauley is correct to say:
The widow Blackacre [is] beyond comparison Wycherley’s best comic character
In full flood she struck me as being almost a female Falstaff. But these few words of praise don’t stop Macauley taking every opportunity to damn Wycherley:
The only thing original about Wycherley, the only thing which he could furnish from his own mind in inexhaustible abundance, was profligacy.
Degrading French originals By which he means his low, mean, degraded subject matter. Macauley accuses him of taking the fine and graceful character of Agnes in the French play L’Ecole des Femmes and turning her into the degraded imbecile Mrs Pinchwife in The Country Wife.
Wycherley’s indecency is protected against the critics as a skunk is protected against the hunters. It is safe, because it is too filthy to handle and too noisome even to approach.
Similarly, Macauley accuses him of taking the light and chaste character of Viola in Twelfth Night and turning her into the much narrower and lewder Fidelia, an attempt at loyalty and fidelity who in fact acts as a pimp for her master; and of taking the misanthropic but essentially noble character Alceste in Moliere’s Le Misanthrope and turning him into the much cruder and more vengeful Manly.
So depraved was his moral taste, that, while he firmly believed that he was producing a picture of virtue too exalted for the commerce of this world, he was really delineating the greatest rascal that is to be found even in his own writings.
Wow. Not the kind of unashamed contempt a modern literary critic would allow themselves. These two pretty old essays bring Wycherely’s life and times and character and works to life far more vividly than anything else I’ve read about him. And hence the value of older literary criticism. It tends to paint a fuller picture of the man, the times and the works. And not be afraid to give pungent judgements.
‘Damn your authors, Courtage; women are the prettiest things we can fool away our time with.’
(Sir Fopling Flutter)
Sir George Etherege (1636-92) came from a middle-class family, may or may not have gone to Cambridge (the record is unclear), he definitely studied law at the Inns of Court then went to Paris with his Royalist father.
Etherege who wrote just three plays, but the first, The Comical Revenge or Love in a Tub, holds the distinction of being the first new play performed in London’s theatres after they were re-opened at the restoration of Charles II in 1660. It was premiered in 1664 and although most of it consisted of old-style heroic verse, it contained comic scenes depicting sophisticated banter between men and women which were entirely new and caught the spirit of the new age.
Etherege holds a distinguished place in English literature as one of the ‘big five’ in Restoration comedy – George Etherege, William Congreve, William Wycherley, George Farquhar, and Sir John Vanbrugh. He is credited as the playwright who invented the comedy of manners and led the way to the achievements of Congreve and Sheridan.
The second of Etherege’s plays, She Would if She Could, was performed in 1668. It is ‘a comedy of action, wit and spirit, although censured by some as frivolous and immoral’. In it Etherege first showed at length the fantasy version of contemporary London in which flirtation is the only serious business in life.
The Man of Mode was the third of his plays and the most celebrated.
The Man of Mode
The protagonist of The Man of Mode is Dorimant, a notorious libertine and man-about-town. He is said to have been based on John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, the most notorious debaucher in Charles II’s court of noted debauchers and by far the most obscene poet in English literature (but then, as such a notorious figure, Rochester’s name was easily attached to any fictional libertine).
Brief plot summary
The libertine Dorimant tries to win over the young heiress Harriet, and at the same time disengage himself from his previous affair with Mrs. Loveit. Despite the subtitle, the ‘man of mode’, Sir Fopling Flutter, is only one of several marginal characters.
Extended plot summary
Act I Dorimant’s chambers – The story opens with Dorimant addressing a billet-doux to Mrs. Loveit, with whom he is having an affair, to lie about his whereabouts. A working class orange seller, Foggy Nan, is admitted to his rooms and informs him about the arrival in London of grand Lady Woodvil and her beautiful heiress daughter, Harriet, who’s been watching and asking about Dorimant.
Dorimant‘s closest friend and fellow rake Medley arrives and offers more information about Harriet ‘vastly rich’. Dorimant expresses his wish to break off his relationship with Mrs. Loveit, being already involved with her younger friend Bellinda. The two friends plot to encourage Mrs. Loveit‘s jealousy by getting a woman acquaintance to talk up Dorimant‘s new affair so that when Dorimant visits her, Mrs L will be furious and it will be she who ends the relationship. Comic interlude with the poor shoemaker.
Young Bellair, the handsome acquaintance of both men, enters and relates his infatuation with Emilia, a woman serving as companion to his aunt, Lady Townley. His relatively innocent devotion is ridiculed. Admiration of Dorimant in his fine suit leads into news that the noted fop Sir Fopling Flutter has newly arrived in London from Paris. Bellair reports that he’s been attending the theatre and visiting Mrs Loveit.
This is perfect for Dorimant‘s plan because he can accuse Mrs Loveit of intriguing with Fopling. Bellair exits and returns with the news that his father has arrived in town and is lodging in the same place as his Emilia – i.e. at Lady Townley‘s. (Lady Townley and Old Bellair are sister and brother i.e. Bellair is Old Bellair‘s son and Lady Townley‘s nephew). Old Bellair informs his son that he has arranged a marriage for him and he must be obedient or be disinherited.
A letter arrives from a semi-literate whore Dorimant is ‘seeing’ begging for money, and Dorimant and Medley think it will be an excellent joke to give her some so she can go and lord it at the opera.
Act II Sc 1: At Lady Townley’s – Lady Townley and Emilia discuss the arrival of Bellair‘s father. Bellair pops by briefly to tell them his father insists he marries the rich heiress, Harriet. Old Bellair flirts with Emilia unaware his son is in love with her. (Young Bellair has acquiesced in his father’s wishes for the time being.) Medley arrives and entertains the ladies with the latest gossip from round town.
Scene 2: Mrs. Loveit and her servant Pert, who asks Mrs L why she likes Dorimant despite his ignoring her. Belinda arrives: if you remember, Dorimant‘s plan is to get Belinda to describe Dorimant paying excessive attention to a masked woman at the theatre, and so make Mrs Loveit mad with jealousy. The plan works perfectly and by the time Dorimant breezes in Mrs L is furious and accuses him of unfaithfulness.
In his defence, Dorimant a) accuses Belinda of libelling him (they both know this is play acting) and b) counter-attacks with the accusation that Mrs L is spending her time with Sir Fopling. She is scandalised at this lie but Dorimant storms out. Mrs L is livid and vows hellfire and revenge, that was part of the plan – not part of the plan is the way Belinda is unsettled at seeing how cynically Dorimant plays Mrs Loveit and, not unnaturally, wonders if he will behave the same when it comes to dumping her.
Act III Sc 1: At Lady Woodville’s – Harriet is stroppy and difficult with her servant, Busy. She is very similar to Hellena in The Rover i.e. she is a canny, scheming witty woman, as clever as any man, yet at the same time claims to know nothing of love, to be an innocent in the ways of love:
HELLENA: I wou’d fain know as much as you, which makes me so inquisitive; nor is’t enough to know you’re a Lover, unless you tell me too, who ’tis you sigh for.
FLORINDA: When you are a Lover, I’ll think you fit for a Secret of that nature.
HELLENA: ’Tis true, I was never a Lover yet…
(The Rover)
HARRIET: I know not what ’tis to love, but I have made pretty remarks by being now and then where lovers meet. Where did you leave their gravities?…
DORIMANT: Where had you all that scorn and coldness in your look?
HARRIET: From nature, sir; pardon my want of art: I have not learnt those softnesses and languishings which now in faces are so much in fashion
(The Man of Mode)
Harriet is the young woman Old Bellair wants his son to marry but a) Bellair is in love with Emilia b) Harriet has taken a fancy to Dorimant. Realising that they are mismatched, Bellair and Harriet make a comically cynical vow to be unfaithful and not in love with each other, and this leads into a comic sequence where they then play-act being bashful young lovers, wryly commenting on each other’s performance of the cliches of love as they do so, for the benefit of their parents, ‘their gravities’ as they call them, Lady Woodvil and Old Bellair.
Scene 2: At Lady Townley’s Lady T and Emilia and Medley are gossiping when Belinda arrives and tells them how upset Mrs Loveit is, and has barely finished explaining her fury at Dorimant before Dorimant himself arrives. Bellinda complains about his behaviour but lets herself be talked into a) persuading Mrs L to go to the Mall later so Dorimant can contrive a meeting between her and Fopling b) agreeing to a romantic rendezvous with Dorimant.
Enter Sir Fopling Flutter but Dorimant cautions Medley not to mock him – he needs him for his plan. So Dorimant and Medley slyly encourage Sir Fopling to play up, to exaggerate his knowledge of Paris, fashion, his fine clothes, and his ornate way of speaking. Mistaking their encouragement for genuine friendship, Fopling falls for the idea that Mrs Loveit fancies him.
Scene 3: The Mall A complex scene of multiple encounters and conversations, the chief of which are: Dorimant for the first time meets Harriet; her guardian Lady Woodvil is there, scared of this wicked devil Dorimant she’s heard so much about, but she is led by the other characters to mistake Fopling for Dorimant. Fopling turns out to be a genuine hit with Mrs Loveit, at least she pretends so, and as she and Fopling leave amid much laughter, Medley ribs Dorimant that seeing her laughing and happy has made him jealous. Dorimant tries to deny it, but it’s true.
Act IV Scene 1: at Lady Townley’s – A big dance. Old Bellair has asides to the audience in which he makes it plain he is in love with Emilia. Dorimant is there, masquerading as one ‘Mr Courtage’ because Harriet’s guardian, Lady Woodvil, has an exaggerated fear of ‘Dorimant’. In this guise of Courtage, Dorimant enjoys politely playing up to old Lady Woodvil‘s prejudices about the good old days and these horrible modern times.
DORIMANT: Forms and ceremonies, the only things that uphold quality and greatness, are now shamefully laid aside and neglected.
LADY WOODVIL: Well! this is not the women’s age, let ’em think what they will; lewdness is the business now, love was the business in my time.
It is a bravura display of disguise and play-acting, a core ingredient of Restoration comedy.
Dorimant engages in extended repartee with Harriet and, in an aside, tells the audience that he loves her. Sir Fopling turns up in masquerade, with a retinue of French musicians and nearly gives the game away by calling Dorimant by his name, till Dorimant tells him he is here under the pseudonym Mr Courtage.
All the characters encourage Sir Fopling to boast about his time in Paris and then encourage him to dance, not realising they are guying him. Dorimant becomes impatient because he had made an appointment with Belinda who – we have seen in some asides – didn’t like his way of putting off Mrs Loveit. Dorimant now scares Lady Woodvil by claiming that the wicked Dorimant is present in disguise, proceeds to see the ladies to their coaches, then heads off home, these latter (offstage) activities reported by young Bellair as he enters to see Old Bellair and Medley.
Scene 2: Dorimant’s lodgings Seems like Dorimant and Belinda have had sex. She is regretting it and begging Dorimant not to tell anyone, and never to see Mrs Loveit in private again. In the middle of this semi-argument, the servant announces the arrival of Bellair, Medley and Fopling. Mortified, Belinda exits down the backstairs.
Once the men have entered, Fopling makes a fool of himself, singing a new song he has written, and the others encourage his ‘love’ of Mrs Loveit, before departing. Dorimant confides to the others he’s quickly off to Mrs Loveit‘s.
Scene 3: The men carrying the chair Belinda is escaping from Dorimant‘s lodgings in take her to Pall Mall instead of home. As she gets out of the chair, she is spied by Mrs Loveit‘s footman who is nearby. Damn! The first night she’s spent with Dorimant and she bumps someone who’ll tell his former – and vengeful – lover.
Act V Scene 1: Mrs Loveit’s Belinda’s arrival is announced by the very same servant who saw her being set down in Pall Mall by ‘Ambling Harry’ who Mrs Loveit knows is the chairman who plies from Dorimant‘s house i.e. Mrs Loveit immediately guesses that Belinda is having an affair with Dorimant. In the same moment, she suspects the part Belinda played in making her angry with Dorimant in Act 1 i.e. that she conspired with Dorimant against her.
MRS LOVEIT: There is no truth in friendship neither. Women as well as men – all are false, or all are so to me at least.
But Belinda just about manages to save the day. She had threatened the chairman with the sack unless they lie and say they picked her up in the Strand. When Mrs Loveit sends her man to interrogate the chairmen, they duly tell this lie – that they picked Belinda in the Strand, not at Dorimant‘s – and as a result Mrs Loveit decides Belinda was telling the truth after all and feels guilty at suspecting her.
At that moment Dorimant is announced, as visiting Mrs Loveit and now Belinda is horrified to discover that the man she’s just slept with and swore faithfulness to her, is, within the hour, paying a visit to his old lover. As a result Belinda feels faint and Mrs Loveit‘s servant, Pert, takes her into the other room to lie down. Pert delivers some pretty ripe double entendres about something lying heavy on her stomach (i.e. she detects that Belinda has recently had sex).
Enter Dorimant and he and Mrs Loveit proceed to have a terrific quarrel circling round the idea that by being seen laughing with Fopling she has debased herself and humiliated him. He throws the love letters she sent him back in her face.
Dorimant is just telling Mrs Loveit that, if it’s true she has no feelings for Fopling, she should meet him one more time in Pall Mall and laugh him to scorn – when Belinda is brought back into the room.
Dorimant is thunderstruck to see her, realising she will realise he is there to pay court to Loveit. Belinda joins Mrs Loveit in scorning Dorimant, through only he and the audience know that there is the real animus of a scorned lover behind her words. When even Pert joins in the chorus of women damning him, Dorimant knows it’s time to leave.
Mrs Loveit orders a servant to follow him and exits breathing fury and revenge. Leaving Belinda solo wondering why on earth she ever slept with Dorimant.
Scene 2: Lady Townley’s Things come to a head. Medley and Bellair and Mrs Townley have invited a chaplain who has already married Bellair and Emilia – but they have barely kissed before Old Bellair arrives with Harriet and a chaplain who he has hired to marry Bellair to Harriet — so they bundle chaplain 1 into a hiding place!
While things are on hold, Emilia teases Harriet that she loves Dorimant, which Harriet denies. Dorimant promptly arrives and he and Harriet have an extended dialogue in which she matches him point for point, as he declares his true, unironical love and she refutes, rejects and disbelieves him.
Chaplain 1 is released from his hiding place as Old Bellair returns onstage and amazes the old man by announcing that his son is already married!
Enter Belinda and Mrs Loveit. Now the entire cast is onstage. Dorimant sort of makes it up to Mrs Loveit by explaining ‘the other woman’ is Harriet who he is motivated to marry because her fortune will patch up his ruined estate. Dorimant tries to make it up to Belinda i.e. sleeping with her and promptly marrying someone else…
Meanwhile, Harriet rebels against Lady Woodvil and announces that she loves Dorimant. Fopling turns up and Mrs Loveit rebuts him. He doesn’t care; he is writing a wonderful ballet which will entrance the entire sex!
Harriet is blunt to MrsLoveit, saying Dorimant has been her god long enough. Mrs Loveit vows to go home and never go out again. Why not go to a nunnery? says Harriet rudely.
Lady Woodvil now discovers that the man she thought was named Mr Courtage is none other than the wicked Dorimant, but everyone speaks in his favour and he was so sweet to her earlier that her heart has softened and she almost approves of him marrying her (rich) niece. She doesn’t agree to their wedding straight away, but Dorimant breaks the habits of a lifetime and promises to come and visit Harriet in her big empty country house.
Harriet then has a speech making it sound empty and lonely, echoing to the sound of rooks. It’s an odd and powerful image in what is otherwise such an urban, London play.
The play ends with music and dancing and Old Bellair encourages the audience to congratulate his son and Emilia.
Cynical manipulation of others
The entire plot consists of the rake Dorimant’s attempts to juggle his various love affairs. There is genuinely heartless cynicism in the way he plans to simply dump Mrs Loveit simply because he’s bored of her. Dorimant’s entire life is devoted to toying with women:
‘Next to the coming to a good understanding with a new mistress, I love a quarrel with an old one; but the devil’s in’t, there has been such a calm in my affairs of late, I have not had the pleasure of making a woman so much as break her fan, to be sullen, or forswear herself these three days.’
Presumably these attitudes were deliberately exaggerated, their heartlessness and cynicism played up, to make them more ‘shocking and comic.
Cynicism about people’s behaviour, specially round sexual morality
‘I have known many women make a difficulty of losing a maidenhead who have afterwards made none of a cuckold.’
When you ponder statements like this you realise there is nothing funny about them except insofar as they are wilfully cynical, the humour derives from the conveying of an entire worldview about love and sex and men and women which is elaborately, exaggeratedly, cynical and superficial.
The cultivation of sin and immorality
The aristocratic figures seek to promote licentiousness and drunkenness at every available opportunity. Thus when Dorimant dismissively orders Medley to give the shoemaker half a crown, Medley insists it is only on condition that the shoemaker uses it to get ‘bloody drunk’.
Conservative moralists had, for centuries, thought a chief defence of having an aristocratic class was that they should provide models of morality for the masses to copy. Clearly, there is a cynical pleasure to be had in puffed-up aristocrats behaving in exactly the opposite manner, spitting in the faces of Puritans and other earnest social reformers, mocking any attempts to take more or less anything seriously.
The reversal of values
In this upside-down world it is virtuous to womanise, to drink to get drunk, to gamble away fortunes, to toy with women’s affections, to cynically manipulate all around you. Religion – real genuine religious faith – is ridiculed, and education is scorned as leading to the production of shallow fops.
‘[Fopling] is like many others, beholding to his education for making him so eminent a coxcomb; many a fool had been lost to the world had their indulgent parents wisely bestowed neither learning nor good breeding on ’em.’
Parents and the older generation are mocked for their seriousness. Harriet ironically refers to her and Bellair’s parents as ‘their gravities’. In fact, everything is mocked.
Wit and repartee
Shakespeare’s comedies are full of banter and word play, which can, admittedly, sometimes get knotted and dense. Sometimes the flow of puns and double meanings in Shakespeare confuses even the people exchanging them (which can then be another cause of humour).
Restoration comedy uses much plainer language in the sense that it is more purely factual. There is occasional wit and set pieces of repartee, particularly between the rake figure and the clever female lead, but even here the play is between ideas more than words, as such. Overall there is a greater focus on elegance of expression, on a kind of melliflousness. The kind of clever word play which clots Shakespearian comedy is largely absent.
Gamini Salgado in his introduction to the Penguin edition of the play says of Etherege’s prose style, compared to that of the first half of the century, that it has a more orderly and elegant rhythm, but is harder and less resonant. I would add that the language has lost almost all its poetic force. Metaphors of sin and redemption and love’s flames etc feel mechanical, have become an empty social conventional rhetoric.
Anyway, that’s how language was used between knowing aristocrats, at any rate. Regarding the rude mechanicals or working classes, there is a lot more of what you could call simple abuse. Dorimant casually insults all the lackeys, servants and tradespeople he comes into contact with, describing the orange woman and shoemaker as ‘vermin’, ‘double tripe’, ‘a cartload of scandal’ and other amusing insults. His footman he describes as ‘eternal blockhead and sot’.
The class-based nature of his arrogance is combined with ultra-cynicism when he tells the shoemaker:
‘Whoring and swearing are vices too genteel for a shoemaker’
Who in turn makes the comic point that the aristocracy will soon monopolise all the sins and vices so completely that there’ll be none left over for poor folk.
Fopling may be absurdly mannered but expresses the same upper-class prejudices as the other toffs. When a servant tells him his name is Trott, Fopling bursts out:
SIR FOPLING: Oh, unsufferable! Trott, Trott, Trott! there’s nothing so barbarous as the names of our English servants.
Insulting marriage
Salgado in his introduction makes the point that one of the clumsiest aspects of Restoration comedy is the way all the characters cynically abuse the institution of marriage for the first four acts, before suddenly converting to thinking it the most perfect state of being, in the fifth.
There are certainly some choice insults of marriage here:
‘’Zbud, there’s never a man i’ the town lives more like a gentleman with his wife than I do. I never mind her motions, she never inquires into mine; we speak to one another civilly, hate one another heartily, and because ’tis vulgar to lie and soak together, we have each of us our several settlebed.’
Old Bellair explains to his son:
OLD BELLAIR: You need not look so grum, sir; a wife is no curse when she brings the blessing of a good estate with her.
Elsewhere, Medley comments:
‘Your nephew ought to conceal it for a time, madam, since marriage has lost its good name.’
References to ‘this age’
It is part of the mystique or worldview of the plays that they are being staged in a specially depraved time:
DORIMANT: An antiquated beauty may be allowed to be out of humour at the freedoms of the present.
OLD BELLAIR: I like her countenance and her behaviour well, she has a modesty that is not common i’ this age.
LADY WOODVIL: The depraved appetite of this vicious age tastes nothing but green fruit, and loathes it when ’tis kindly ripened [i.e. prefers young girls to mature women]
1. There’s a kind of self-regarding, self-satisfaction with living in such a very depraved time. 2. Every age has considered itself especially fallen and corrupt – you can find the same kind of references in literature from the ancient Greeks, through Chaucer and Shakespeare.
Gender stereotypes
Feminist critics generally have it in for all these male Restoration writers. Jane Spenser in her introduction to The Rover repeatedly refers to the ‘misogyny’ of the Restoration literary world, and there is, without doubt, an enormous amount of anti-women rhetoric, and cynical manipulation of women characters.
But reading these plays without the blinkers of feminist ideology, it’s just as obvious that all the characters are stereotyped, manipulated and mocked. The most manipulated and mocked person in this play is a man, Sir Fopling Flutter, who exists solely to be laughed at. Other entire groups are mocked; for example the entire older generation are ridiculed, all servants and the entire working class are ridiculed.
And, in these plays, men are subject to just as much withering criticism and virulent stereotyping as women. In fact the plays work through the systematic stereotyping of both genders:
Stereotyping women
‘Faith, women are i’ the right when they jealously examine our letters, for in them we always first discover our decay of passion’
MEDLEY: I wait upon you, and I hope (though women are commonly unreasonable)…
YOUNG BELLAIR: ’Tis not unnatural for you women to be a little angry if you miss a conquest, though you would slight the poor man were he in your power.
EMILIA: There are afflictions in love, Mr. Dorimant.
DORIMANT: You women make ’em, who are commonly as unreasonable in that as you are at play…
MRS LOVEIT: Those noisy fools, however you despise ’em, have good qualities, which weigh more (or ought at least) with us women than all the pernicious wit you have to boast of…
DORIMANT: There is an inbred falsehood in women which inclines ’em still to them whom they may most easily deceive.
MEDLEY: Besides, ’tis a common error among women to believe too well of them they know and too ill of them they don’t.
MEDLEY: Like a woman, I find you must be struggled with before one brings you to what you desire…
HARRIET: Did you not tell me there was no credit to be given to faces? that women nowadays have their passions as much at will as they have their complexions, and put on joy and sadness, scorn and kindness, with the same ease they do their paint and patches—Are they the only counterfeits?
If you only quote these kinds of statements, then the plays can be made to look monstrously misogynist. But they need to be balanced with the scores of times when men are mocked, stereotyped and ridiculed.
Stereotyping men
MRS LOVEIT: There’s nothing but falsehood and impertinence in this world; all men are villains or fools.
DORIMANT: Indeed, the little hope I found there was of her, in the state she was in, has made him by my advice contribute something towards the changing of her condition. [enter YOUNG BELLAIR] Dear Bellair, by heavens I thought we had lost thee; men in love are never to be reckoned on when we would form a company.
HARRIET: The sordidness of men’s natures, I know, makes ’em willing to flatter and comply with the rich, though they are sure never to be the better for ’em
HARRIET: Mr. Bellair! let us walk, ’tis time to leave him; men grow dull when they begin to be particular.
MEDLEY: But I have known men fall into dangerous relapses when they have found a woman inclining to another.
HARRIET: Men are seldom in the right when they guess at a woman’s mind; would she whom he loves loved him no better!
HARRIET: In men who have been long hardened in sin we have reason to mistrust the first signs of repentance
MRS LOVEIT: There’s nothing but falsehood and impertinence in this world; all men are villains or fools.
Mocking both sexes
And then there are plenty of places where characters mock both sexes equally, in effect ridiculing the human race.
HARRIET: That women should set up for beauty as much in spite of nature as some men have done for wit!
MRS LOVEIT: He bring her! His chair stands near Dorimant’s door, and always brings me from thence – Run and ask him where he took her up; go, there is no truth in friendship neither. Women as well as men – all are false, or all are so to me at least.
MRS LOVEIT: The man who loves above his quality does not suffer more from the insolent impertinence of his mistress than the woman who loves above her understanding does from the arrogant presumptions of her friend.
Stereotyping the old and their silly laments for the good old days
LADY WOODVIL: Well! this is not the women’s age, let ’em think what they will; lewdness is the business now, love was the business in my time.
LADY WOODVIL: Unsufferable at thirty! That they are in the wrong, Mr. Courtage, at five-and-thirty there are living proofs enough to convince ’em.
DORIMANT: Ay, madam, there’s Mrs Setlooks, Mrs Droplip, and my Lady Lowd; show me among all our opening buds a face that promises so much beauty as the remains of theirs…
Stereotyping Jews
MEDLEY: Is it not great indiscretion for a man of credit, who may have money enough on his word, to go and deal with Jews who for little sums make men enter into bonds and give judgments?
Stereotyping the lower classes
HARRIET: She [Harriet’s servant, Busy] has a voice will grate your ears worse than a cat-call, and dresses so ill she’s scarce fit to trick up a yeoman’s daughter on a holiday.
Stereotyping the dullness of the countryside
YOUNG BELLAIR: Are you in love?
HARRIET: Yes, with this dear town, to that degree I can scarce endure the country in landscapes and in hangings.
YOUNG BELLAIR: What a dreadful thing ’twould be to be hurried back to Hampshire?
HARRIET: Ah! name it not!
Or:
BELINDA: Pity me rather, my dear, where I have been so tired with two or three country gentlewomen, whose conversation has been more insufferable than a country fiddle.
Or:
MRS LOVEIT: Where do these country gentlewomen lodge, I pray?
BELINDA: In the Strand, over against the Exchange.
PERT: That place is never without a nest of ’em; they are always as one goes by fleering in balconies or
staring out of windows.
HARRIET: This is more dismal than the country, Emilia; pity me who am going to that sad place.
In other words, the entire play is a tissue of stereotypes. The characters repeat almost nothing but stereotypes, cliches and truisms, which the audience are intended to recognise with a knowing smile, and applaud. Picking out only the anti-women sentiments seems to me to miss the bigger picture of the generally misanthropic cynicism of the total worldview.
P.S. A mirror up to society
The verse prologue, written by the improbably named Sir Car Scrope, contains a particularly clear expression of the age-old doctrine that the theatre holds up a mirror to society.
For, heaven be thank’d, ’tis not so wise an age
But your own follies may supply the stage.
Though often plough’d, there’s no great fear the soil
Should barren grow by the too frequent toil,
While at your doors are to be daily found
Such loads of dunghill to manure the ground.
’Tis by your follies that we players thrive,
As the physicians by diseases live;
And as each year some new distemper reigns,
Whose friendly poison helps t’increase their gains,
So among you there starts up every day
Some new unheard-of fool for us to play.
Books & Boots 